Hello all. I have a colleague who bought all the components for a "home build" and got on with it very well. However, we have a problem whereby the BIOS is not listing his SATA drives and is seeing his Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard as an A8N-SLI E mobo instead. Obviously, there is currently no OS on there as we need to get the BIOS to see the drives first. So we downloaded the latest A8N-SLI Premium motherboard drivers from the Asus site, put them onto a DOS bootable floppy with the AWDFLASH.EXE prog and tried to change the BIOS setting but to no avail (the AWDFLASH prog saying that the motherboard file was not compatible). What is odd is that, for interest's sake, I put the A8N-SLI E drivers onto the floppy instead and it accepted those without complaining!!! Now I know what you're going to say - "It must be an A8N-SLI E mobo then?". But it definitely is not - we have checked the mobo and printed on the middle of it bold letters: Asus A8N-SLI Premium! Out of interest, we also tried using the drivers that come on the motherboard support CD, but the only one that worked from the CD was again the A8N-SLI E one. Can anyone tell us what on earth is going on?! Thanks in advance, Tim.
BIOS and drivers are two separate things. You cannot flash drivers to a BIOS. The BIOS is firmware, drivers are software. That's the problem. The BIOS for the A8N-SLI boards is likely all the same, as well as the drivers. If you try to flash drivers to a BIOS, that's probably why you're getting the errors. The error probably didn't recognize the file type the drivers had.
If that's the case, what were the drivers I downloaded from the Asus website then? On their site, the download is listed as: A8N-SLI Premium Bios version 1009. And the BIOS for all A8N-SLI boards is definitely NOT the same. I have spoken to him since and he mentioned that when he received his motherboard originally, the BIOS was reporting it as a Premium board (but it was still not listing his SATA drives). He then pressed ALT+F2 (which runs a BIOS update utility) and this changed the BIOS to recognise the board as a SLI E not SLI Premium (I know, I know, he shouldn't have changed anything but I think he was desperate to solve the problem!). I looked at the BIOS before and after and it definitely looks different. There used to be SATA slots listed (albeit without any drives listed) but now there are no SATA slots listed, only IDE. The error didn't recognise the drivers/BIOS flash update file because it thought it was the wrong one, but it is actually the right one for that mobo. However it didn't error (when it should have done) when I offered it the 'E' model driver.
You're confusing me by interchanging BIOS and drivers. They're two entirely different things, so it will really help if you don't swap them with each other. I'm not sure if their any known issues with the 1009 BIOS, but you might try flashing an older version (say 1008) and see if that makes a difference. I'm not aware of any A8N-SLI E. I do know that there are the A8N-SLI SE and the A8N-E. The A8N-SLI SE is like the other A8N SLI boards and is an nForce 4 SLI motherboard, but has a very meager packaging with it. The A8N-E is an nForce 4 Ultra board, and bears a noticeably different layout and configuration than the A8N-SLI boards. You might want to double check what you flashed, as that might play a significant role in the list. While we're at it, would you mind listing what's all in this system. Include the power supply too.
