I've never had any problems with any brand of external USB drives on my A8N-SLI Deluxe system.

Ramoth Mizpah said:

Wow - I found this mammoth thread using Google.
Looks like the thread is slowing down - the early days were great.
I tried to read the whole thing looking for answers - but the thread won,
I'm about 2/3 of the way through. Anyways,
I have an Asus A8n-SLI Deluxe since early July 2005.
Has been working well, no problems:

Configuration:
AMD Athlon X2 4600 Dual cpu
WD raptor 74 gig 10,000 rpm - fast
WD 200 gig 7200 rpm - storage
PC Power and Cooling 510 SLI 650 watts - the best
Cosair XMS 2 x 1GB 184 pin DDR400 PC3200 - pretty reliable
CD/DVD Plextor 716 E-IDE (baffling at times)
Antec P180 with 3 120mm fans - large but ok!
Windows XP sp2 - resisted changing
Video card BFG 9500 GT 1 GB DDR2 memory
(used to have XFX GeForce 6600 GT 128 meg)
1 - 24" Dell flat panel - at 1920 x 1080i (best with dual link DVI cable more throughput)
1 - 19" HP f1905 (single link DVI cable)
I have nVidia Nview software controlling the monitors
I built this sytem from scratch in 2005.

I would like to add a Samsung 19" SyncMaster940b that I have doing nothing for now.
I would like to use the XFX GeForce 6600 GT 128 meg as 2nd non SLI video card.

I think my PC P&C power supply can handle the power requirements of two cards.
My BFG 9500 GT is in the blue PCI-express 16 slot.

When I put the XFX GeForce 6600 GT in the black PCI-express 1 slot
my system hangs at boot up time before any screen text shows anything.
It seems like there should be enough power considering the other powerhouse
video cards setups I have read about in this thread.

Thanks for any help,
Rick

Also should add to above Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe configuation:

BIOS is version 1011 (have not gone to latest)
Why upgrade if there are no problems, till now.
Both video cards are nVidia brand.

Help
New to this site. Alot of good information. I have not been able though to find an answer to my question.

I have a Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. I had a problem blue screening in Outlook. I decided it had been 4 years the board had been stable . No blue screen unti a week ago. So I cecided to Change my raid from 0 to 1 just because I felt the drives are getting old (74GB 10,000 rpm raptors) and windows had never been reinstalled. (Media Center 2005) I had been running bios 1016 and read to downgrade the bios reinstall the drivers to the newest. Instead I noticed that the latest bios 1805 metioned nothing about having to downgrade before installing new drivers so I flashed that. Installed the raid and installed windows with drivers. However when the computer starts to boot you notice the cpu fan getting slower then speeds up goes through bios loading and gets to the windows logo and then the cpu fan will slow down again and the computer reboots. Three out of five times it will do this maybe otherwise it loads straight through with no problem. I thought maybe the power supply and seing mine was 4 years old I bought a new Corsair 750 watt. The problem is the same. I removed the tv tuner card and thats the only other card other then my video card xfx geforce 6600 ddr3 128mb . Once in windows no blue screen no problems in applications.

Edit I should also let you know I memtested all memory for 24 hours twice. I also disconnected the cpu fan and loaded that way thinking it could be shorting out or something. Still no good

I really could use some ideas. Posted something in Asus forum but no responce.
Thanks

Mike:

I submitted the post above yours.
I have the same SATA Raptor hard drive that you have 2 of.
Also, I had the same video card XFX GeForce 6600 GT.

You have ruled out the memory.
You ruled out the power supply.

How about the Raptors and the raid 1.
Any evidence of 1 of the raided Raptors taking all the IO while the
other drive has a problem.
Could do a scan disk on both.
Also, could do a virus check for viruses.
Several SATA raid ports to try.

Could swap video card from blue PCI express 16 to black PCI express 1 and back again.
But does not sound like video problem.

CPU fan sounds consistent with warming up and cooling down and warming up.
I have had had no trouble with my A8N SLI Deluxe until I tried to make a change.
Seems to be difficult to make changes to this motherboard.

You can go into the BIOS and stop the splash screen and show the startup progress
in text.
Also, I wonder about the BIOS settings for PCIPnP.
I have Plug & Play OS = NO (even though I have Win XP sp-2 and it works well)
My Init Disply First = [PCIex]
Resources = [Auto]

I am no expert, just giving ideas for tweaks or diagnotics.

Rick Thompson

Thanks Rick
I tried new driver for video card. Its like you say it worked flawlessly since march of 2005. I have scanned all my disks. The raid was installed and drives formatted before installing windows again. I wish I had another processor to try just to rule that out. I have no problem once it passes the windows logo. Its just funny how the cpu fan slows down right before it fails to load. If the fan doesnt slow down you know it will load fine. I guess I should never turn it off and it will be fine.

hi,
Let me first tell you about my system configuration.

AMD Athlon 64 processor 3200+
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 6200 turbocache PCI Express card
1GB RAM
120 GB SATA Hard disk (seagate barracuda)

These are the main components. A few months ago my sony dvd writer(IDE) suddenly stopped working .Then i purchased an LG DVD writer (HL-DT-STDVD-RAM).At that time i didn't realise that choosing a SATA writer over an IDE writer is going to cost me dearly. My system started to hang up very often. Most of the time when i put a cd in the drive, the system will stop working and it starts to make some kind of beep sound continuously. When i tried to restart the system either the bios failed to recognize the hard drive or otherwise the hard drive failed to boot.

At first i thought the problem lies in my hard drive. Then i replaced the hard drive. But the problem still exists. I think there is some kind of compatibility issue in this case, because sometimes both the hard drive and the writer works perfectly. Even my DVD writing speed is good (it took me approx 13 mins to write 4.4GB at 4x speed ). but then most of the time my system crashes with a blue screen telling me that some recently installed hardware is not working properly.

The Bios that i use right now is version 1805. Is it a good one ?? i updated when my OS was XP. i didn't update the chipset driver b'coz i failed to find the right version in the nvidia site. i'm confused about the nforce series. which version should i use??. a few days ago i installed vista 32bit in my system hoping to solve the dvd writer problem. but it created a negative effect. now my system shuts down suddenly after 30-45 mins. and when i try to restart the sytem it will shut off immediately before loading the OS. If i didn't use the system for 2 or 3 days then it will start and work smoothly for few hours , and then it will eventually shuts down without any warning.

Is it my bios??.........or is it my old chipset driver??.......Please help me and don't forget about my sata dvd writer( when i brought that sata writer , i didn't know at that time that my motherboard has some issues with sata dvd writer ), i don't have any money left to buy another IDE drive . SO PLEASE HELP ME

One more doubt. Is there any known issues of using vista in this motherboard?? should i go back to the more reliable XP SP2???

This thread is f**king HUGE, holy s**t!