Formating with Raid O on Windows XP Pro -Help-

[Omicron_15_]

Hi,

This is my first post. I was recently putting a new system together. I am trying to use two Maxtor 60gig 133ATA drives in Raid 0 as my primary and only hard drive. I have a Gigabite GA-7VRXP which comes with promise contoller built in. The array is created fine and it checks out. I can format it with Fat32 fine and it checks out with scandisk and fdisk and everything. But when XP tries to reformat with the NTFS file sytem in either quick or regular stuyle it gives me an error saying that eather the drive is defective or that it is not pluged in correclty, so I cant install XP onto that Raid 0 array. I tried installing XP on the array with fat32 formating, it installed the installer program but when it rebuted it wouldn't boot from the array, it said no "ntldr" and would try to boot of another drive. I dont know what "ntldr" means. I then destroyed the array and tried installing with one of the drives. It worked perfectly. SO, I tried installing on the other drive, It worked perfecly. I am using the latest driver for my raid controller. When I install I have used both the defalt windows driver along with the latest driver. I don't think the prablem is the actual valedity of the raid 0 array becouse it checks out fine with fat32, and i have a felling that it would work fine on win98 SE, but I think it has something to do with the NTFS formater for XP. This is my first time working with XP. I think it is thinking that the Raid 0 array shold be the size of the first hard drive, 57gigs, when it is formating, and when it relizes that it is larger then that, 115gigs, then it says something is wrong with the drive even though nothing is wrong. I have read the other posts here on similar problems but they dont seem to the same. Please I need help! Thanks.

 

[Zlash]

NTLDR is the file that loads the OS and is kinda important =p.

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[ath0mps0]

I have seen this (and other related problems) before. It all comes down to the quality of the Promise RAID drivers for XP - when you use a single drive the RAID controller is usually in ATA mode instead of RAID mode and uses a different driver (or portion of the driver file). I have had no end of difficulties with Promise RAID cards (I have several of them) under Windows XP - problems that don't exist under Windows 2000 (and I prefer WinXP). I currently recommend IWill RAID cards if people experience these problems and a BIOS update and the latest drivers don't resolve them.

I thought a thought, but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I had thought.

 

[Zlash]

Or have you tried loading the raid drivers manually at the beginning of the XP installation by hitting f6?

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[Omicron_15_]

yes i did load them manually before i install xp, if i don't load them with f6 xp dosnt even see them.

 

[ath0mps0]

Another option that seems to work is to:

1. Install WinXP on another (spare) drive with a FAT32 partition (or whatever if you decide to keep this drive as your boot drive) without the RAID array configured - don't even plug the other drives in - don't select F6.

2. Install the Promise RAID card and setup the array.

3. Boot into WinXP, install the latest Promise drivers and reboot.

4. If you can't afford to (or don't want to) continue using the extra drive as a system drive continue onto 5. Otherwise, format the array within WinXP and you're done.

5. Boot to DOS.

6. Run Ghost or DriveImage or other partition copying utility.

7. Copy the "C:" partition from your spare drive to the array. It is critical that they both be FAT32. Adjust its size to your ideal boot partition size if you wish. Set this partition as active and as the boot partition. Power down when finished.

8. Remove the spare drive. Boot to BIOS config and set the system to boot from "ATA/SCSI" or whatever your bios uses to specify the RAID card/slots.

9. Boot to DOS and edit the boot.ini on the array "C:" partition to point to the array - sometimes this takes a bit of fiddling to find the right combination of controller, drive, and partition numbers.

10. When you find the right combination, your system should now function perfectly.

I thought a thought, but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I had thought.

 

[Crunch]

I recently ran into this problem as well with ABIT TH7-RAID mobo, the problem was fixed once i got the latest drivers from from Highpoint for the controler.

 

[mata2974]

I have the same exact problem,except with win2k, How did you finally resolve it please email me at gm2974@yahoo.com

 

[kal326]

Had the same problem with the normal long format, but if you use quick format it will format the drive and install. The problem that I am now having is that the raid array seems to have corrupted or for some other reason winxp locked and started crashing out. After reboot the system will not load XP, can get to recover console and thats it. I am not so sure of the drivers that are provided by gigabyte. For one there are two options for drivers when setuping up WinXP, "S" and "M" I have yet to find out what the differance between them is. I don't remember which I got to work, but the array has now crapped out. I want to figure out this little raid problem before I reload XP.

Error RAID!!! Error RAID!!! Heads crashing down everywhere, oh the humanity!!!!

 

[BGates2B]

Heh heh heh

That's a cool signature.

My vote for Signature of the we...urr, year (at least, with as often as they change them)

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