Windows/PC Gurus: BIOS, RAID and Codecs questions

Three questions here.

  1. I’ve been living with this for ages 'cos I’ve never actually gotten around to fixing it, but since my 500 gig SATA drive is flaking out on me requiring me to RMA the stupid thing (less than a year old) and buy a new one to ghost everything back to this weekend, I figured I’d clean up a few things.

First and foremost is a problem with one (or more) video codecs on my system. At least one of them is causing Explorer to die when Windows tries to display a preview of the video in the preview pane. I figure it’s a codec that Windows is not happy with, or potentially a conflicting codec, so I’m essentially going to remove them and reinstall them one-by-one to make sure everything is installed properly. Problem is I’m not sure where these codecs get installed to. I presume there’s a communal place in one of the Windows folders where they sit, but which one? Do they take on a common naming structure or extension? (I presume they’re just DLLs)

  1. RAID. Here’s what I’d like to do. Since I’ve bought a replacement 500 gig hard drive (same make/model, in fact) this weekend, and am going to RMA my existing one, I’d like to run its eventual replacement in a RAID array with my new one. I’m currently running on an Asus A8N32-Premium, BIOS version 1009 (I think), which has SATA RAID ports. My only real question I guess is how I should set it up. 0? 1? 0+1? I want the data mirroring of RAID1, but the performance increase of a striped volume in RAID0 would be nice. I’ve never run RAID before so advice would be helpful.

  2. Speaking of BIOS version, I’ve been trying to figure out just what the hell is up with Asus’ website regarding BIOS versions for their A8N boards. See, I want to flash my BIOS to the latest version (which I’m told has better RAID handling than my current version) so in preparation for doing so, I downloaded all BIOS versions above my own from Asus’ website for the A8N32-Premium, each of which are 512K BIOS files. (I like to be thorough in case one or another version doesn’t work properly) When I backed up my own BIOS however, I discovered it is a 1 meg BIN, not half a meg, so I can’t flash with a 512k BIOS file because you can’t flash a 1 meg BIOS with a half meg BIOS file. On the other hand, the BIOS files for the A8N32-Deluxe (one step below mine) are 1 meg. I even tried flashing my BIOS with the A8N32-Deluxe 1405 BIOS. It flashed fine but presented all sorts of device driver problems once Windows booted up, so I re-flashed with my original BIOS. Anyone familar with these boards and know what BIOS files I’m supposed to use to flash?

Any help is appreciated.

I’d try the forums at ArsTechnica if I needed this kind of help.

Edited To Add: not that here won’t help, but Ars is a bit more inclined that way

Thanks – just joined up. I didn’t even really think of Ars. :slight_smile:

A BIOS isn’t something to guess at. You have to have the correct one or you’re going to have a dead unbootable machine.

In terms of RAID - You can have Raid0 or Raid1.
You would need 4 drives for Raid0+1.

You need to decide whether you want a fast system with lots of storage (and expect to lose the lot if a drive fails) or a secure but slower system. There is NO data recovery from a Raid0 failure.

And at the end of the day, your SATA Raid system is probably faked in BIOS and by the driver - in other words, it’s a marketing gimmick that provides little (but some) benefit and poor security (except when mirroring).
Go with the Raid1 mirror, two copies of the data in that situation is the safest.

Si