Help with raid 0 setup
 

A month or so ago my mate bought a new rig.

It's similar to mine except his is the board above with 8 Sata and two different types of Raid controller SIL and nforce.

He has two identical 160Gb sata drives.

When we first set it up we could not get Windows to recognise the array.

We tried both drivers and ports on both controllers. We used the floppy at XP setup stage too.

The disks are recognised but XP refuses to see the array which we set up in both raid controllers.

Any ideas?

Really stumped.

Cheers.

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

Have you used disk management to tell XP to use the drives in a raid format? You are formated as dynamic drives aren't you?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

Is that the way to go?

I thought you could get it sorted at the setup screen?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

Are you installing a new copy of windows ontp the Raid setup then?
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.c...eid=830&page=1
and http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/mb...-333/raid1.htm
and
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/i...ask=view&id=29
have "dummies" guide to raid that might help you check what you have done so far against what needs to be done. Never know it might remind of a setting that you have adjusted etc
I think it's easier to install windows and then sort the raid out but you should be able to do it from Setup.

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

If it's easier to do from Windows then I may just do it from there.

Does this not just make it a software array?

The problems we were having are definitely driver/controller related.

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

Do you know the exact model of the mobo?
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According to someone elsewhere you can do if during setup after booting from the XP CD:
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Is the Raid controller correctly set in the BIOS and the settings for the drives etc and boot sequence??

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

If the RAID is working correctly, XP should only see one drive in Disk Management.

The NForce RAID driver had it's own raid manager util that should allow you to create a mirror set whilst running under XP (I'll be trying this shortly). You should have XP loaded on one drive and an unused/unformated/unpartitioned secondary drive. If both SATA channels are configured for RAID in the BIOS, the NVRaid manager should see both drives and allow you to mirror the primary disk on to the second. (Thats the theory - will be trying this weekend!)

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

I put the disk in at the f6 prompt but the next portion of setup does not recognise the Raid array.

It is the GA-K8NXP-9.

Apparently the SIL raid is twice as fast as the nforce one so would obviously prefer to use the SIL.

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

What jumper settings are in use on the drives, are they currently formatted and what IDE channel are they coneected to at the moment?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

Not seen the SIL controller myself, but afaik if it is working correctly you should see the BIOS report a single RAID disk on the SIL controller.

Then at the 'f6 prompt' with the correct drivers disk, WXP should load the drivers and report them on the list of loaded drivers before you hit 'enter' to continue.

Then when XP asks you which partition to use, there should only be one logical drive available.

At what point is your issue - BIOS, loading driver or no/multiple disks available?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

One other thing is how are the drives showing in the BIOS and have any settings been changed within the Raid settings in the BIOS itself?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

The array shows up in the SIL bios.

The problem is that even after the f6 bit, windows refuses to accept the array.

They are not on IDE channels, they are SATA and do't have jumper settings.

They are formatted.

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

How are they formatted? NTFS, basic, dynamic etc? Are the drives actually partitioned ready to go yet?

Re: Help with raid 0 setup
 

They are formatted NTFS but it didn't work when they weren't.

I don't think that would make any difference.

A drive doesn't have to be formatted to be recognised by Windows setup does it?