MSI P965 Platinum, system won't boot only when ICH8R is in RAID

[seowitz]

So I couldn't get my system to boot properly when I have the ICH8R in RAID 1 mode.
I have the boot drive on a single, non-raid Wester Digital 250gb Cavair HD on the ICH8R.

Installed XP Pro SP2 with the ICH8R in IDE mode. I installed XP in IDE mode, did all driver updates, then put the ICH8R into RAID 1 mode for my other data drives and the system will post, boot and get to the Windows XP boot screen then the system just restarts before the boot completes. It does it in normal boot mode and safe mode.

With the ICH8R in IDE mode everything boots/runs fine.
The problem is, I need the 6 SATA RAID controllers on the ICH8R as I have 3 RAID1 arrays.

I've done all the updates to windows, motherboard bios, Highpoint RocketRaid bios update, tried every mode on the ICH8R, unplugged the Highpoint Rocket Raid, left it plugged in with no drives plugged in, disabled the Jmicron controller, everything I can think of.

Any help would be appreciated.
I did not do the windows floppy driver install for the ICH8R when I installed XP, but I have not had to do that in the past with the ICH7 on my old motherboard so I assumed I wouldn't here as I've been told it's just if you are installing windows on a RAID.

System:

MSI P965 Platinum
Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU
(4) 1gb OCZ Gamer Extreme DDR2 PC6400 RAM
Windows XP SP2
High Point Rocket RAID 2300 PCI Express x1 RAID card
Asus nVIDIA GS7300 PCI Express Video card

Drives on ICH8R Controller:
Boot Drive: WD Cavair 250gb SATA2
DVD: Some sony 16x DVD - SATA
RAID1: (2) Seagate Barracuda 320gb SATA2 HD's (setup on previous motherboard on Intel ICH7 Controller)
(2) Seagate Barracuda 500gb SATA2 HD's

High Point Rocket RAID 2300 Controller:
(2) Seagate Barracuda 500gb SATA2 HD's

 

[BustedSony]

A controller in enhanced mode will generally not properly read a drive only formatted in standard (or basic or IDE) mode. Thus there are read errors. If the drive was previously formatted under enhanced mode then used on a basic controller for OS install it will also later work on an enhanced controller. Reformat the boot drive and reinstall the OS under the current configuration. You'll need to install the sata driver from a floppy at F6. I've had this problem also.

One other risky trick to save the drive is to reformat under enhanced mode then use GetDataBack to write recovered data back to the SAME drive, I did that to a boot drive once to recover from an accidental format.

 

[seowitz]

i was hoping to avoid the 4th attempt at installing the os, starting with Vista ultimate 64.

 

[seowitz]

nope, loading the ich8r raid driver didn't work. I loaded it through the floppy with the f6 in the xp install then when it went to install after the restart I would get a "cannot read disk" failure when the startup drive is plugged into the ich8r.

so i then tried to install the drive on the jmicron controller with the same problem i'd get with the ich8 in raid mode and couldn't get past the initial driver load off the cd.

i'm pretty over dealing with this POS.