
Ok, that should be an easy fix.
Go into your BIOS. Somewhere in there, you will see a setting for assigning your IDE drives to either the NVidia RAID function or to normal IDE. You want your CD/DVDs to be normal IDE.
If you want to get rid of the Removable Devices thing, you can try removing all drives from the RAID chip's control. If that renders your computer unbootable -- highly possible -- just put your hard drive(s) back under the RAID function again.
Obviously, don't remove any hard drives from RAID control if you are actually running a RAID.
Edit to add: if you have an SATA hard drive, just set all the PATA ports to be regular IDE, that should solve it in one.
My normal thing with NVidia chips is: install most of the drivers, but never never install the NVidia IDE drivers, and install the absolute minimum possible with the network drivers.
Once the network drivers are installed, turn off all firewalling and anything that says 'offload'. There's "TCP Checksum Offload", among other things. That stuff causes big problems. Then I'd try your wireless card again... if it still breaks, maybe you should go for a different chipset/CPU?
What's the brand of the wireless card?
As long as you have 64-bit drivers for all your hardware (check AHEAD OF TIME), you should be fine with XP-64. You lose 16-bit compatibility in 64-bit mode (a stupid decision by AMD), but unless you have exceedingly old software, you should be fine.
The specific issue is that some older installers are 16-bit. The software, written in 32-bit mode, would run fine, but the installer won't. You can generally hack your way around that by installing into a 32-bit image under VMWare, and then manually copying files and making registry changes. That's a giant pain in the butt, but it should work for almost anything written since 1995.
Anything written or updated post-2000 is likely to install and run without issues.
It may be the mobo and not XP that is causing the problems. Some models of motherboard just don't like having all the RAM slots filled for some reason. I had a nice ASUS mobo a while back that was rock solid until I filled the last RAM slot, for a total of 1.5GB of RAM. All of sudden I had BSODs and hard locks galore. Were those DVD drives detected properly by the BIOS? If not, I don't see how the problem could possibly be XP.
Also, can I ask what sort of gargantuan photos you will be manipulating that require 4GB of RAM? I do a fair amount of photo and video editing at work and 2GB generally works well for me, unless I'm simultaneously working with a lot of very large files in multiple apps.
Past a certain point, it won't matter anymore anyway... individual 32-bit programs can generally only see 2gb anyway. In 64-bit mode, you get the ability to run multiple 2gig 32-bit programs at once, but a program has to be in 64-bit mode to see any more than that. (you can also use a /3gb switch to allow up to 3gb per process, but that's not always compatible.)
I believe Photoshop has the ability to use a dedicated scratch drive. This lets it use more 'memory' by manually swapping data in and out -- much like the OS would, except that Photoshop can use more than 2gb this way.
The main problem with this approach is that disks are slow. If this seems to do what you want, but it doesn't run fast enough, you can improve the speed a great deal by buying one of the memory 'disks'. These things are just a bunch of RAM on an expansion card; they look like a disk to the OS. They're volatile; they go away when the power shuts off. Each time you power up, you have to reinitialize the disk, which of course takes only a few seconds.
Double check and make sure that Photoshop (or whatever program you're using) does indeed have this swap ability, and that it seems to do what you want. If it does, you can maximize speed by putting that swapfile onto a memory disk. Don't use flash -- flash is slow and wears out from that kind of use. You want a DRAM 'disk' instead. If you're interested, I should be able to find pointers.
Oh one more thing: did you triple-check with the guy that he removed the PATA ports from the NVidia RAID function?
1DGaf, if he's getting uppity with you, I think it's time to return that unit and find a new PC builder. It doesn't work, it has never worked, and now he's giving you a hassle? Just get your money back and look elsewhere.
The situation is this: because we want XP, we'd have this RAM problem whoever we went with.
That's just not the case. I know of a number of audio pros who run XP rigs with 4GB of RAM and while some of them have had initial problems all of them now have perfectly stable rigs that see daily demanding usage. Until I see some documentation that this is a known and universal issue with XP I remain very skeptical of what this guy is telling you.
Many of them have been running 32, since the VST standard has only just recently been updated to work with 64. Of course, audio guys tend to avoid things like high end video cards that soak up lots of PCI bus bandwidth and they also tend to be very picky about motherboards. For instance, NForce4 boards were taboo for quite some time because the way graphics hardware was prioritized in that chip set was known to sometimes cause poor latency in audio hardware.
I just bounced this off my IT guy at the office and he agrees: even XP-32 and 4 GB would not cause these kinds of hardware issues without some kind of hardware or driver problem. This still sounds like chip set issues to me.
XP32 is limited to 4gb of physical address space, period. This means that you just can't get more than 4gb minus ROM space and address space for your video card. There is no way around this that I know of; it's a design decision on Microsoft's part.
Server2K3 will run nearly anything that XP will, and it's not limited to 4gb of physical address space; it'll handle up to 64 gigs. It uses an addressing mode in the processor called PAE, Physical Address Extension. This allows for 36 bits of addressing on a 32-bit processor, or 64 gigs. XP could do this just as well, but Microsoft has decreed that it won't. You have to do some fiddling around with Server2K3 to get it to run consumer stuff; you have to manually turn on hardware acceleration, for instance, in your video and sound cards. It works very well post-fiddling. The only thing I've found that won't run on Server2K3 so far is Gametap.
But even Server2K3 isn't a panacea. The board I'm running right now, the ASUS P5B, 'supports' up to 8gb of RAM, but the chipset is odd. You'd THINK they'd put the ROM space first, and then add RAM on top, but they don't; if you want 4gb of RAM, you have to move the ROM space outside 32-bit addressing. This works fine in Server2K3, but the X-Fi (and, presumably, other PCI-based soundcards) doesn't like that a bit. The X-Fi does a lot of DMA, and it can't DMA to memory outside 32-bits. There may be a fix I haven't found, but so far, I either have to limit myself to 3gb, even in 64-gig Server2k3, or else use another soundcard.
A true 64-bit operating system avoids all of these problems, but does have one of its own: you have to have drivers written in 64-bit mode. Once you have that, you can run 32-bit programs, you can use almost any conceivable amount of memory, and 64-bit software can address the full memory space available. Current chipsets are 'limited' to 48 address bits, or 262,144 gigabytes of RAM. We'll probably be okay there for awhile. Note that Core2 chips are NOT 64-bit: Sandra claims I'm 32-bit only. If you want an assload of memory, AMD is likely to be a much better choice.
FWIW, this is very similar to the problem we had when transitioning from the 640k barrier (16-bit addressing) to 32-bit mode. That was painful, too. Fortunately, this is the last addressing transition most of us will see in our lifetimes. Memory sizes double every 18 months or so, meaning that we use one additional bit every year and a half. If we continue at that rate, 64-bit addressing should last us comfortably until 2050. At that point, those of us that are still alive can snicker at all the kids who are Female Doggoing and moaning about the yottabyte limitations.
Hey 1D, I've started a thread on this over here at gameaudioforum.com. At least one guy has already posted that he's running a stable 4GB system with XP-32.
Yeah, that is total bullshit. It's clear that this builder guy doesn't know WTF he's talking about. I don't know if it's an option for you at this point, but I'd start looking into a refund and buy it from a reputable dealer.
Again, I'd suggest checking that the PATA ports are removed from the NVidia RAID control. It's not hard to figure this out, just wander around in the BIOS a little.
Once you've done that, if you still don't have optical drives, pull them out and double check that they're either both set to Cable Select (usually CSEL), or one is Master and one is Slave. There's generally one set of jumpers on all CD/DVD-ROMS with those three settings. Usually, it's right next to where the IDE cable plugs in.
Have you tried other DVD drives?
A new DVD burner is ~$30, it'd be a shame for a $30 part to be causing all this trouble.
If your bios sees the drives, but windows xp doesnt...
Maybe you need to go into Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Disk Management. Look on the lower half of the screen (the gray area) and you may see the optical drive(s) listed without a Drive letter assigned for the system.
You can right click on the drive (i.e. CD Rom 0,1) etc and select the "Change drive letter and paths" option to assign them to the drive. Normally this should be all automatic, but just give it a quick see. I believe if no drive letter is assigned to a media device (shouldve happened during intall, but there has been 'tinkering' since)... it wont show up under My computer etc and it surely wont have a path (G:\ H:\ etc)
If the optical drive is listed as a letter prior to the hard drive ones, you might switch it so it is the final drive in the list. (i.e. Hard drives C:\ D:\, followed by cdrom of E:\) I believe if an optical (removable) drive has a drive letter before the fixed disks, sometimes the system cannot it because it likes to have removable media at the end of the list. I wouldnt touch the fixed disk drive letters, but instead just make sure the optical ones are appearing after them. Alter the optical one if need be.
(Sidenote: Even if you have the optical drive as the final letter within windows and you need to boot from it, you can set this via the computer bios that it checks the cdrom for bootable media first before it goes to the harddrives.)
Make sure you are comfortable if you decide to make any changes. The biggest thing to be careful of would be mistakenly changing the drive letter of your root fixed drive. (avoid this, its where windows is expected to be).
Even if you dont make any actual changes.. you can use the above disk management to confirm windows xp has the device listed, but just doesnt have them accessible because of the lack of path designations.
Double posted (sorry) see my idea above. Its one you can check yourself quite quickly.
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