NEW RAID 0 causing games to crash?? LOSING KEYPACKETS IN BF2142 etc..

[DrunkenMafia]

Well I finally updated my old ide to 2 160gig sata2 hdd's the other day and I got them in, installed the drivers and then winblows.

Everything went fine.

The only problem is that when I try and play bf2142 now I keep getting a large pause in game and then punkbuster kicks me for "Losing keypackets LF???". This only happens randomly but when it freezes my hdd light is going flat out.

Now I have also noticed when in windows it will occasionly completely freeze for about 5 seconds, again hdd light going overtime, then continue on..

The only thing I can think of is my stripe size being to small. Mine is at 16K. Should it be bigger???

I have read a lot of forums with people having a lot of trouble with this board and RAID.. but they seem to be having crashes, BSOD's etc.. Mine is working fine. I get like 350m/s transfer rate with hdd tach.

I am also using the ULI chipset for my raid setup and not the SIL one (there are 2 controllers on the board).

Any help would be appreciated as I am half temped to go back to single drive config, which would be a shame seems my games are loading in like 10 seconds!!!!

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Any Ideas.. been playing with it a again 2 day and it still seems to do it randomly. I fugure it must be RAID related as that is the olny thing that has changed.... It never did it before.

 

[DRDNA]

Go into Computer Managment and go to event viewer and then highlight applications and look in the left pane for TrueVector Service errors . The errors will have a red circle with an X. Then check the system logs which is also in Event Viewer look for disk errors and report back . I will bet you have a bunch of both.

 

[mikek75]

I've got the same mobo as you, and as you probably already know some boards are affected by the ULI bug. It causes random freezes which may be what you are getting. Its one of those really annoying bugs which doesn't affect every board, but the old DFI Street forum was full of people having issues. IIRC people switched to the SIL controller and this solved the issue.

Not an ideal solution since the SIL is sata1 but TBH I don't think you really notice much difference, I certainly haven't. DFI got shafted by Nvidia when they bought out ULI, so the chances of a fix are nil unfortunately!

 

[DRDNA]

mikek75, so what exactly is the fix? Is it to move the array to a different set of ports?

 

[mikek75]

Yeah, but you have to re-build/re-install the array, you can't just swap the ports unfortunately. I'm using the SIL controller myself and its fine. The only trouble is that for some reason you can't use the Ethernet ports with the SIL enabled, at least, I can't. When I tried to have both enabled the bios screen scrambled and froze......I'm using the 7/28 bios BTW.

 

[DRDNA]

mikek75, Very nice follow up !!

 

[mikek75]

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Here is a pic of the system log.. I may just move to the sil sata but i do use the ethernet for the adsl modem.

I might even go back to just 2 single drives if it keeps it up. What about a plug in raid card, would that fix the problem and would I still get the same disk speeds??

 

[mikek75]

Those m5288 errors are indicative of the ULI problem so it looks like you've been unlucky. You can easily check whether you're ethernet is going to go down by enabling the SIL controller in the bios (you'll also need to disable the ULI) and rebooting, if you are affected you'll get a freeze before it starts to load the OS, and you'll notice characters missing in some of the words onscreen. Note, if you do this you might have to reset CMOS and re-configure the bios. Bit messy I know.....

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Ok sweet,

The only problem is how am I going to disable the ULI and boot to windows as the os is on that array??

It is no problem for me to just start from scratch on the sil raid as I only installed windows a couple of days ago..

I did a full defrag last night so I will give gaming a go now and see if that fixes it. I also downloaded a newer uli driver from dfi and have installed that.. see if that helps.

Cheers for the support

Good on ya

 

[mikek75]

I only suggest enabling Sil/disabling ULI to check whether with the Ethernet controllers working it will go to the bootup sequence or whether it will lock/screen corrupts. Just for diagnostics, obviously you'll need to re-enable the ULI to actually boot. Bit hard to explain as its 0215 am here!

Another thing to try before you go through the hassle of switching controllers, in the downloads section here there is a beta driver for the ULI controller which is newer than the one on DFI's site, you could give that a try.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

ok thanks mate, will give that a go...

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Ok so i downloaded the one in the download section and it is the same version as the dfi site.. I reinstalled it anyways.

I realised too that I still had the Sil sata enabled in bios so I disabled that as i don't use it. Maybe that will help.

Also i found this in the device manager. Should I enable NCQ for both of my drives.. I have found some mixed info on it............

Now I have also read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

What do you think...

 

[mikek75]

The beta diver in the downloads section here is definitely later, its 6.2.2.1, the one on DFI's site is 6.1.0.0. Although I've never had any joy updating the driver from within Windows, whenever I've tried it, it goes into an infinate loop and won't boot, but hey, if you've done it congrats!

To use that NCQ feature, in the BIOS go to the Genie config, select PCI device control/Advanced SATA feature/SATA mode select and pick AHCI Mode.

But, TBH I think that since you are getting those ULI (m5288) errors, no matter what you try its going to be a problem. Not wishing to piss on your parade bud, its just that from what I read on DFI street, people spent months trying everything under the sun without much joy. Options are to either use the SIL controller, or you could always get hold of a PCIe RAID controller card. Like I said, DFI got shafted when Nvidia bought out ULI, and Nvidia ain't going to help out an ATI chipset board.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Hey mike

Well I figured what the hell and reformatted and tried the Sil sata ports....

And that my friend is where my little all friggin day adventure started!!!!

Sil would load all the setup files and restart to configure windows and just freeeze at the first screen. tried about 3 times... each time sitting thru a complete windows install.. no deal.

So I went back to the uli using different ports and a larger file size (64k). And...... wait for it........ couldn't even boot. So THEN i go back to the original sata ports I was using... Nope don't like that either now, i sat thru another couple of windows installs and the same blue screen lockup at the start. I found that if I disabled one of the lan ports then the pc wouldn't even boot with the uli selected.

So now I have installed on 1 sata drive and everything works fine.... so far!!!

I am going to ring up the guys I bought it off and see if I can swap it, considering DFI is certainly not going to fix this problem...

Thanks for the help though guys

 

[mikek75]

When you swapped to the SIL you did disable the ULI didn't you? You can't have both at the same time, something to do with insufficient space in the bios ROM.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Yeah im pretty sure I did bro.. Oh well doesn't matter now as I am just using the 2 drives seperately and haven't noticed all that much difference in loading times in games.. Its still a shitload quicker than the old ide that I was using.

Thanks for the help though, I am still tempted to send the board back and see if they will let me swap for an AM2 board or something, but then I have to get rid of my new opty 165 which I am loving atm. and new ram etc....

I am thinking about it though, might even duck over to the dark side for a while and test out a C2D...... I have a bit of an OC bug thats all and haven't got room at my place for more than one pc....

What do you reckon??

 

[KillZone]

Well you should definitely get rid of that massive overclock and see if it works. I've had
boards in the past that just would not work with a large oc + raid. Not always a good combination.

So just try running the system at stock and see how it goes.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

heeheee. I would rather keep the oc...

No seriously I did try running it at stock this morning when doing a fresh install and it didn't help at all mate.

I swear i tried everything this morning, I think i installed windows about 9 times today in 7 hours............

Now that is what I call fun.......... fukin M$ / DFI

 

[KillZone]

Well you won't be too happy about this but you could install the OS on a single drive. Get rid of the raid and that would probably solve your problem.

Either that or try the controller card as mentioned above or maybe rma the motherboard and hope you get one that works. Those early boards may have had problems.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

yeah that is exactly what i did KZ. That is what i was saying about the loading times not being all that different. I think I will just stick with the single sata2 setup for now...

Good on ya