Vista - Vista64 all day and finally installed!!

over and over tried different things different drivers for nforce raid.. nothing worked, then finally after hours of frustration I did one simple things that fixed all and now windows vista 64 is installing. And what did I u wonder.. I have 2 serial ata drivers raided and one regular Ide drive.. ide drive was just a backdrive.. but it was setup as a primary drive. I disconnected the IDE drive and weeeeeeeeeee it started to install I hope this helps any one.. did not need any special drivers yet!!!! still installing will update soon

ok 64 vista installed working fine so far, just had to remove ide drive had not hooked back up yet but should not be aproblem now!

I messed around for a full day trying to load 64 Vista! Finally, I removed 2 of the 4 GB of Memory and it loaded. When I reloaded the full 4 GB after the install, it blue screened! Now what!!!!!!!

gbakmars,
Now take the two that gave you the error and install them alone. If it starts all your memory is good.
You may have to crank your memory voltage higher to get all 4 running. Try 2.1 volts and see how that goes.
Of course since I don't know what you are running for equipment this is a guess.

Thanks! I am running Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6- QX6700, with 4 GB Corsair Dom. 8500 C5, Dual 8800GTX EVGA SLI, 2x150GB Raptors Raid 0 (Vista 32) and 2x750 Seagate Barracudas (Raid 1) off of Areca 1210 Raid Controller. Off of nVidia Controller-2x36GB Raid 0 (Vista 64).

The memory is all fine. Just cannot get all 4 GB to work in Vista 64.

Also, I cannot boot into Vista 32 unless I physically disconnect 64 hard drives.

Also should have included that the 4 GB have been installed and running in the 32 Vista. I did have to do what you indicated, and up the voltage to 2.1+ to get them to work in Vista 32.

So basically two issues:

#1 How to get 4 GB to be recognized in Vista 64

#2 How to change the boot order to Vista 32

When you start does it ask you which system to start? Did you try searching for dual boot Vista, I've heard of others dual booting but usually XP is the other one. Does your BIOS mention other devices to start from in the boot order section?
Have you searched the Corsair site for tips on your mem/mobo combo, they might even recommend a higher voltage, or different timings.
I hope you have a massive power supply, at least 700 watts, probably even more. But if you have those 2 video cards powered up I know one thing, it has plenty of lines coming out of it.
I have an Areca 1220 that I gave up on, I just run everything from my mobo, fortunately it has 8 SATA ports. I really wanted to run everything RAID6 but it was not to be.
I know my setup runs real hot, yours must be even hotter. The Areca alone was almost hotter than my video card.
How much memory did x32 show with the 4 Gigs installed, mine showed 3.5 I believe.
My Q6700 ran almost too hot for a few weeks but eventually settled down and became normal. I use a Zahlman 9700 aircooler and they said it would cool down after a while, which I didn't really believe, but should have.
Good luck your gonna have an awesome system when you get it going, I had to play with mine for about a month before it finally began to act right. I reinstalled x64 about 3 times gave up and installed x32 for a while, now I've been with x64 for a few months and I'm staying with it.

Mine runs at about 45 C under normal conditions. I ran a Prime 95 test yesterday for an hour and it leveled off at about 68 c. I haven't done any overclocking yet. I don't have a boot option right now. I go into Vista 32 if and only if I disconnect the 64 drives.

You should reconsider the Areca. I had trouble initially. I finally figured out that I had to uninstall all drives that were not connected to the Areca controller. It works great. No Raid 6 though. I think there are many that bought for Raid 6 and it didn't come through.

I am running an Ultra X3 1,000 Watt PSU.

I stumbled upon these forums after doing a search for a printer driver. I just
registered on these forums to answer your question.

I installed Vista x64 this weekend and now have my system up and running with 4GB ram. It took me quite a few install attempts (since I tried installing with overclocking and RAID) before I figured out what was wrong. The following knowledgebase article will be of help to you:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777

Bottom line: install Vista x64 with 2GB of ram, install the patch provided in the KB article, and then install the additional 2GB of ram.

I have come across that update a couple of times and wasn't sure if it would "fix" my problem. I will go for it! Thanks! Are you dual booting? I have the two Raid 0's and thought that since they are totally seperate drives, I couldn't possibly have any boot issues. It does seem though, that my Vista 64 is being identified by the BIOS as the "primary" boot drive, and I am not sure how to switch that. If you want to email, send to my screen name at aol. I have spent the last 14 months interceding for XPS 700 customers to get an upgrade in their motherboard. I finally decided that I should be building my own!!

I don't think that you want to fiddle around in the BIOS with regards to primary boot drive settings. Otherwise you will have to change that every time you want to boot to the other OS.

Below I quoted a Microsoft webpage that can be found here:
It sounds like you need to select one drive as your primary drive which stores the MBR. Then you need to verify that your BCD contains both OSes on different drives. You will probably find that one is missing and you will need to add another one. I would caution you to be careful as you may not be able to load Vista if you change the wrong settings. I should also add that I have never done this before but I am fairly confident that these are the steps you need to take.

The command to edit the BCD is BCDedit.exe. You should have enough information now to perform a web search and figure out how to use this tool.