[. . . ] IN NO EVENT SHALL ASUS, ITS DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES OR AGENTS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS, LOSS OF USE OR DATA, INTERRUPTION OF BUSINESS AND THE LIKE), EVEN IF ASUS HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES ARISING FROM ANY DEFECT OR ERROR IN THIS MANUAL OR PRODUCT. SPECIFICATIONS AND INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MANUAL ARE FURNISHED FOR INFORMATIONAL USE ONLY, AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AT ANY TIME WITHOUT NOTICE, AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSTRUED AS A COMMITMENT BY ASUS. ASUS ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY ERRORS OR INACCURACIES THAT MAY APPEAR IN THIS MANUAL, INCLUDING THE PRODUCTS AND SOFTWARE DESCRIBED IN IT. Products and corporate names appearing in this manual may or may not be registered trademarks or copyrights of their respective companies, and are used only for identification or explanation and to the owners' benefit, without intent to infringe. ii Contents Notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . ] Pressing the power switch for more than 4 seconds lets the system enter the soft-off mode regardless of the BIOS setting. See section "4. 5 Power Menu" in Chapter 4. 3-2 Chapter 3: Powering up 3. 3 ASUS POST ReporterTM This motherboard includes the Winbond speech controller to support a special feature called the ASUS POST ReporterTM. This feature gives you vocal POST messages and alerts to inform you of system events and boot status. In case of a boot failure, you will hear the specific cause of the problem. These POST messages are customizable using the Winbond Voice Editor software that came with your package. You can record your own messages to replace the default messages. 3. 3. 1 Vocal POST messages Following is a list of the default POST messages and their corresponding actions: POST Message No CPU installed Action · Install a supported processor into the CPU socket. See section "2. 3 Central Processing Unit (CPU)" for supported processors. See the "ASUS contact information" on the inside front cover of this manual. · Check if the DIMMs on the DIMM sockets are properly installed. · Refer to section "2. 4 System memory" for instruction on installing a DIMM. · Install a PCI VGA card into one of the PCI slots, or a 1. 5V AGP card into the AGP slot. Click Yes on the confirmation window that appears. If you receive an error message telling you that the files exceed the total allowable size, do one or all of the following. · Try to modify your messages to make them shorter · Save the wave files at a lower quality · Skip lesser used events like FDD Detection, IDE HDD Detection, etc. 3-8 Chapter 3: Powering up Chapter 4 This chapter tells how to change the system settings through the BIOS Setup menus. Detailed descriptions of the BIOS parameters are also provided. BIOS setup Chapter summary 4. 1 4. 2 4. 3 4. 4 4. 5 4. 6 4. 7 Managing and updating your BIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4-30 ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard 4. 1 Managing and updating your BIOS The following utilities allow you to manage and update the motherboard Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) setup. Award Flash BIOS Utility (Updates the BIOS using a floppy disk or during POST. ) 2. ASUS Update (Updates the BIOS in a Windows® environment. ) Refer to the corresponding sections for details on these utilities. Important notes It is recommended that you save a copy of the original motherboard BIOS file to a bootable floppy disk in case you need to restore the BIOS in the future. Copy the original motherboard BIOS using the ASUS Update or AWDFLASH utilities. Visit the ASUS website and download the latest BIOS file for this motherboard using the ASUS Update utility. 4. 1. 1 Creating a bootable floppy disk 1. At the DOS prompt, type: format A:/S then press <Enter>. Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP environment a. If you are using WindowsTM XP, select Create an MS-DOS startup disk from the format options field, then click Start. OR If you are using WindowsTM 98SE/ME/2000, select Full option button from the format type, then click Start. [. . . ] ESC Enter Ctrl-E Select Menu Previous Menu Select Exit 5-14 Chapter 5: Software support Creating RAID Sets 1. Select if you want the utility to Auto Configure the RAID Set or if you want to manually configure the RAID set. For Mirrored Sets, you assign which is the Source and Target drives, as well as if you want a Disk Copy. · What is a chunk?Available chunk sizes: [2] [4] [8] [16] [32] [64] [128] When manually setting the chunk size for your RAID set, it is recommended to use the smaller chunk size for server applications and the larger chunk size for AV applications. [. . . ]