One of the eVGA 9600GSO hot dealio cards got here today, so it was clear that I had a hardware upgrade mission to attend to. I knew it wasn't going to be a walk in the park, but ... yikes, was I in for a hair puller ! 
Started off with the simple fact that SLI cards do not easily fit in anything other than a full sized tower case. I was using a new Raidmax Smilodon Extreme case, that I really do like after spending some hours with it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowIm...w%20-%20Retail
Existing card (no sweat fitting that in !!):
First concern was getting the hard drive moved in the cage to accommodate the bigger card it replaced. No sweat, until I realized that adding the second card (with its dual width cooler) would effectively cover ALL of my SATA ports !!
New card, oops .. its BIG !!:
Hmmm ... OK. Just use some special right angle SATA cables that I had handy just for such an emergency. After I booted into Vista, I soon was warned that my Vista Business was 'not genuine'
and I need to re-activate it. I guessed that this was an issue with the key being used on another build that I put together last year, so I had no idea why it was being flagged now (its a retail DVD, so I can transfer it from PC to PC), other than this was MS just being MS with an aggressive WGA policy.
Rather than phone it in, I wanted to give Vista 64 a try, so I pulled an identical drive to the one in the PC, going for the dual everything approach this time. Dual core, dual video, dual HDs, so I set about creating a RAID array to install on the drives.
Ohhh, but now I had to rearrange the drives yet again due to the fit of the second card (not here yet, but eyeballing it you could clearly see that it would hit the power and SATA cables from one if not both drives). OK, this was starting to wear me down, but nothing seemed insurmountable yet.
I get my RAID array created, I install Vista Ultimate 64 and I'm booting into Vista and downloading ... 277mb of updates !! Yikes !!! Well, after that finished, I put the brand new Nvidia drivers on, then rebooted.
BSOD, reboot. BSOD, reboot. BSOD, reboot .... the endless loop.
I first tried Safe Mode, then VGA mode, then 'Last known good config', and finally 'Disablea reboot upon BSOD'. That netted me the totally worthless Stop:00000000x1a erro message !!
Next up was repair install of Vista, assuming an update or driver has hosed it.
That met with no success either !! But it did resume the troubleshooting from that point after the BSOD, reboot loop this time. It then offered to use an earlier restore point ... *shrug* ... OK, I hadn't really done anything in Vista to that point, but sure enough, there was a restore before the Nvidia driver update.
YESSSS !!! Got logged in, got back to the desktop and was able to continue with the driver installs and my usual suite of utilities to go on the PC. Its now doing another crapload of updates, but I guess the Nvidia driver released two days ago is a no go for me, at least on Vista 64.
Trust me, I doubt my troubles are over, but I did learn some stuff from this one, and that's the bottom line. If you can edumicate yourself a bit from these hair pullers, its at least some benefit when it happens again.
I'll bench it once I get everything situated, but a quick check of the Windows Experience index netted this (quite worthless, IMO, but all I had to see how it compared to my main rig):
5.7 Overall
My main rig earned a 5.6 (?!?) but it was all 5.9 scores other than the Primary hard disk (netting me that 5.6), so I assumed RAID would improve that score. Ermmm, not much. I only improved to 5.7 using the RAID'ed 320gb Seagate drives. Anyhoo, its a 64 bit platform to test, and I don't have to worry about hosing my main rig when I have this rig available.
Started off with the simple fact that SLI cards do not easily fit in anything other than a full sized tower case. I was using a new Raidmax Smilodon Extreme case, that I really do like after spending some hours with it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowIm...w%20-%20Retail
Existing card (no sweat fitting that in !!):
First concern was getting the hard drive moved in the cage to accommodate the bigger card it replaced. No sweat, until I realized that adding the second card (with its dual width cooler) would effectively cover ALL of my SATA ports !!
New card, oops .. its BIG !!:
Hmmm ... OK. Just use some special right angle SATA cables that I had handy just for such an emergency. After I booted into Vista, I soon was warned that my Vista Business was 'not genuine'
and I need to re-activate it. I guessed that this was an issue with the key being used on another build that I put together last year, so I had no idea why it was being flagged now (its a retail DVD, so I can transfer it from PC to PC), other than this was MS just being MS with an aggressive WGA policy. Rather than phone it in, I wanted to give Vista 64 a try, so I pulled an identical drive to the one in the PC, going for the dual everything approach this time. Dual core, dual video, dual HDs, so I set about creating a RAID array to install on the drives.
Ohhh, but now I had to rearrange the drives yet again due to the fit of the second card (not here yet, but eyeballing it you could clearly see that it would hit the power and SATA cables from one if not both drives). OK, this was starting to wear me down, but nothing seemed insurmountable yet.
I get my RAID array created, I install Vista Ultimate 64 and I'm booting into Vista and downloading ... 277mb of updates !! Yikes !!! Well, after that finished, I put the brand new Nvidia drivers on, then rebooted.
BSOD, reboot. BSOD, reboot. BSOD, reboot .... the endless loop.
I first tried Safe Mode, then VGA mode, then 'Last known good config', and finally 'Disablea reboot upon BSOD'. That netted me the totally worthless Stop:00000000x1a erro message !!
Next up was repair install of Vista, assuming an update or driver has hosed it.
That met with no success either !! But it did resume the troubleshooting from that point after the BSOD, reboot loop this time. It then offered to use an earlier restore point ... *shrug* ... OK, I hadn't really done anything in Vista to that point, but sure enough, there was a restore before the Nvidia driver update.
YESSSS !!! Got logged in, got back to the desktop and was able to continue with the driver installs and my usual suite of utilities to go on the PC. Its now doing another crapload of updates, but I guess the Nvidia driver released two days ago is a no go for me, at least on Vista 64.
Trust me, I doubt my troubles are over, but I did learn some stuff from this one, and that's the bottom line. If you can edumicate yourself a bit from these hair pullers, its at least some benefit when it happens again.
I'll bench it once I get everything situated, but a quick check of the Windows Experience index netted this (quite worthless, IMO, but all I had to see how it compared to my main rig):
5.7 Overall
My main rig earned a 5.6 (?!?) but it was all 5.9 scores other than the Primary hard disk (netting me that 5.6), so I assumed RAID would improve that score. Ermmm, not much. I only improved to 5.7 using the RAID'ed 320gb Seagate drives. Anyhoo, its a 64 bit platform to test, and I don't have to worry about hosing my main rig when I have this rig available.
Comment