Asus A8N SLI Disk order in XP

[RayM]

Doh! Time to ask for help.
This MB is most bizzarre. MY normal method of setting up pc's is to install the MB then add one hard disk to the first MB IDE port.
Install XP (and maybe dual boot).
Then add one disk at a time and use partition magic or XP Disk management to initilise & format the disks.

This MB is the first one to have a sata drive as the first connected.
Followed by the IDE ports then the rest of the NVidia ports, then the SIL ports.

So the physical port order & windows management order is:
IDE 0 -- 2x 200G Raid 0 ---- Disk 5
IDE 1 & 2 -- 2x CD ROM ---- Disk 7 & 8 (as expected)
NV Sata 0 & 1 - 2x 200G raid 0 --- Disk 6 (Boot C, D, Docs)
NV Sata 2 -- 280G --- Disk 4
NV Sata 3 -- 120G (Roms) --- Disk 3
SIL3114R 0 & 1 -- 2x 300G raid 0 - Disk 2
SIL3114R 2 ---- 300G --- disk 1
SIL3114R 3 ---- 300G --- disk 0

This is exactly the opposite order to the boot scsi list.
Resetting the bios to default does not rearrange the boot order.

Anyone know how to rearrange the windows order to match the scsi boot order?
Thanks

p.s. no more raid testing until i have sorted my dual boot and 10 years of duplicates & backups..

Ray

RayM

 

[ChipDeath]

I guess it's probably tied into the way the BIOS enumerates the disks/controllers, if I'm reading you correctly, so I doubt you can do too much about it...

Obviously you can change the boot order, but why is the order they appear in windows so important? Surely after you've formatted all the windows disks and assigned them whatever drive letters you want, you'll not have any need to view them at this low level?

So I'm a little confused as to exactly why this is a problem...

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[RayM]

So the problem occured like this.
I originally had the dual boot system running on a single ide drive on port 0. I attached 2 x200G sata drives to the NV port and initilised them as raid 0 in bios and windows. I then ghosted the IDE drive to the raid array, disconnected the IDE drive and "all was sweet" after I reset boot.ini to the correct drive ID.
I then progressivly added non-raid drives to the other cables and all was ok.
When I set the other drives to raid0 pairs, the bios changed them to scsi, then windows lost the plot because the drive order flipped.
Reinstalling x32 windows again fixed that problem but I can't reinstall x64 windows. Bitches about an invalid partition :-(. Deleting and recreating a new partition isn't helping, it's always invalid.
Next weekend I think I will try a clean install on scsi 0 (sil3114R) instead of its present location on scsi 3.

The reason for this post is to find if anyone else has had this "bug" occur.
Ray


RayM