Question : Problem: Asus A8N-SLI Premium Windows XP Pro Install Continuously Reboots

Hello,
    I am having some trouble reinstalling windows on my machine. Specs are as follows

Asus A8NSLI Premium (Bios v 1009)
2 GIG RAM
1 WD Raptor 74GB SATA (On SATA 1)
2 160GB Seagate SATA II Drives (RAID 0 on SATA 2,3)
Plextor DVD Drive (On SATA 4)
2 Geforce 7900GTX SLI
SB XFI Fatality

Please let me know if you need more info.

I have had a working installation on  this system before, so this is a new problem. This does seem to be a fairly common one, though n on of the solutions I have read on other boards have worked yet. When I went to reinstall windows, I put in the floppy with the SATA RAID drivers from the nforce4 6.7 series. It went through the first few steps of the installation fine, but when it came time to copy files over to the HD, I got a "Setup cannot copy the file: nvraid.sys" error. If I skipped over it, it had issues with copying all the files it needed for the nvidia driver. If I let it copy the rest of the files I got a blue screen of death. I tried this with the 6.53 drivers with no improvement.

I then decided to try to slipsteam the drivers.
I used nlite to do so with a custom WIndows XP PRO SP2 installation. I used the 6.83, 6.7, and 6.53 drivers. I also tried using nlite to make the iso and then burning it with Nero, or letting Nero compile the bootable CD. All of them had the same result. A successful install right up to the first reboot (after the graphical stage of the install) and it continuously reboots.

I then read that I needed to replace the text in Nvidia's txtsetup.oem with the following:

[Disks]
d1 = "NVIDIA RAID DRIVER (SCSI)",\disk1,\

[Defaults]
scsi = nvraid

[scsi]
nvraid = "NVIDIA RAID CLASS DRIVER (required)"
nvatabus = "NVIDIA NForce Storage Controller (required)"

[Files.scsi.nvraid]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,nvraid
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll

[Files.scsi.nvatabus]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,nvatabus
inf = d1, nvatabus.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll

[Config.nvraid]

[Config.nvatabus]

[HardwareIds.scsi.nvraid]
id = "GenNvRaidDisk","nvraid"
id = "*_NVRAIDBUS","nvraid"

[HardwareIds.scsi.nvatabus]
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_008E", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0085", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00D5", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00EE", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E3", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_00E5", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0035", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0036", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_003E", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0053", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0054", "nvatabus"
id = "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0055", "nvatabus"

This also had no effect.

This seems like a tough one, so any help would be appreciated. I have already been through about 1o0 Custom Windows XP2 Setup disks!

Thanks
WJF

Answer : Problem: Asus A8N-SLI Premium Windows XP Pro Install Continuously Reboots

Are there any other drivers you could try? It looks as if you have tried 3 bad nonworking versions. Are you trying to install the OS to the raptor or to the raid0? Also, your board has 2 different sata controllers, a silicon image and a nvidia one. Did you connect the drives to the controller you are trying to install the drivers for?