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View Full Version : Vista x86 on NF2 Motherboard


Tom
02-02-2007, 04:07
I've spoke about this in the drivers thread, but I'm hoping a seperate thread outlining my root issue may raise some ideas.

I've got an Abit NF7-S v2.0 that Vista cannot find NIC or SoundStorm (on-board sound) drivers for. As you may (or may not) know, Nvidia have officially dropped support for the chipset. So they're no help. /starts petition. ;)

Though back in the beta days, I heard of mixed response with the NF2 chipset; some said things worked, others said it was broken. I tried anyway, as there's very little that I can find on Google.

Is there any beta-bod out there with an Nforce 2 chipset, whom has had more luck?

I'd like the fully test the operating system out -- everything runs quite smoothly, and it would be a shame to have to ditch it because of a silly thing like a NIC/Sound driver.

EDIT: I've since realised Vista was trying to install my Netgear FA311, and that my Nvidia on-board NIC was disabled. I enabled the Nvidia NIC, and Vista installed it perfectly (that's what you get for installing OS's at 3am :p)

I've since connected to Windows Update and it updated almost all my Nvidia drivers, so a restart and a BSOD later -- I now have a working NIC, and working sound!

Some things don't work on the sound, like the mic, but at least I can listen to some tunes now..

The Netgear FA311 still doesn't work.

Furthermore, I've now noticed that Vista won't boot unless the bootable DVD attempts to boot first. Eg. If I try to boot with nothing in the optical drive, I receive the message 'BOOTMGR not found, press CTRL + ALT + DELETE to restart'.

The only way I can boot, is to have the Vista DVD in the drive, wait for it to ask 'Press any key to boot from CD/DVD...' and let it run out. It then boots from the S-ATA controller and we're into Vista.

Really, really bemused as to how Vista has supposedly not installed a Bootloader. :confused:

Tom
06-02-2007, 17:44
An update: Oh it did installl a bootloader, just not where it should've!

I'd chosen my S-ATA RAID array as the install drive (after loading the appropriate driver), so Vista decided that the lonely IDE drive I had sat there with all my data on (and nothing else) should have the bootloader.

F***ing dumb :rolleyes:

Thinking about this now though; there may have been an older MBR in place from when XP was installed on that IDE drive. Vista would be right to think you might want to install the new MBR there, but why on bloody Earth doesn't it just ask you where you want it to be? That's the dumb bit.