A few things have happened since I last posted here. However, I am trying to install mirroring and it doesn’t work. I’ve written to Gigabyte for support. This post is a supplement for them to read.
The above picture is unbelievably bad but it’s the only shot I was able to get of the opening screen. I don’t know what causes the blurriness but I suspect something causes the display to move. The real purpose of this shot is to show the BIOS version is F4.
Next we get the RAID BIOS screen. It shows a configured array.
The above shot shows the main BIOS screen. Not much use but you can see my flash drive is attached.
The above shot is the Basic setup screen. Not much to see here.
The Advanced options screen is also horrible but there’s nothing that matters here.
The above shot is the most important so far. It shows that I have disabled the ICH9 SATA ports (the top two entries) and configured the Gigabyte ports (the purple ones) to RAID/IDE. This agrees with what is shown in the manual.
The above shot is the PC Health screen. It shows the CPU runs incredibly cool but the North and South bridge chips are quite warm.
The above shot shows the RAID config screen. Seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s also the single best shot I was able to get of a character-mode screen.
The above shot (and all the following shots) come from the installation program. I selected Repair because I was hoping it would find my existing install and repair it. I have also gone through the following steps on the Clean Install option but the result is the same.
The above shot shows Vista prompting for media. The manual said to create a floppy and I wasted 3 hours attempting to do this – the floppy setup software will not run under Vista. However, the manual was wrong – Vista is able to load drivers from a variety of sources.
I downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte’s website and copied them onto my flash drive.
There’s only one inf file so I selected it.
Vista finds lots of hardware being described. I also tried the 32-bit path but it said there were no drivers for the hardware. More likely, there were no drivers Vista could make use of.
Vista then spends quite a few seconds attempting to load these drivers…
and fails. I’ve tried this with a variety of BIOS settings and I’ve also tried the drivers on the GSATA\Application\jmide path. None of them work and Vista gives no reason why.