Help with raid 0 setup

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 10:59

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.

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 11:36

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?

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 12:00

Is that the way to go?

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

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 12:12

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.

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 12:23

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.

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 12:26

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:

Quote:

but for hardware raid it was no problem - just Hit F6 when setup asks you to (very soon after booting from your XP Home CD) and then Hit S when setup promps you to and insert your F6 Raid floppy so that it can load the raid controller files it needs.

I found it is a good idea to leave the floppy in the floppy drive until after the Welcome Screen (just make sure your Floppy is only 3rd boot device) so that you can be sure that all files are copied by Windows setup when they are needed.

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Is the Raid controller correctly set in the BIOS and the settings for the drives etc and boot sequence??

Aragorn · 12-05-2005, 12:26

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!)

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 14:46

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.

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 17:43

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

Aragorn · 12-05-2005, 17:43

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?

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 17:44

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?

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 18:24

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.

Paul K · 12-05-2005, 19:20

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

McGraw · 12-05-2005, 23:41

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?