Buzz Foster

Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

I'm setting up my system with RAID, and I followed the instructions (correctly I thought). Unfortunately, when I boot to my Win XP Pro 64 disk to install the OS, I get a message that Windows cannot find any hard drives, and my only option is to press F3 to exit.

My motherboard is an Asus crosshair, with an nVidia Nforce chipset, with built-in RAID. I tried to set up mirroring with striping first. I have two 500GB Hitachi deskstars, and two 1TB Hitachi deskstars. The idea was to have a single, 1.5TB mirrored RAID volume. That didn't seem to work, as all I got was a 1TB volume. So, I tried two mirrored volumes, the boot as 500GB, and the second as 1TB. The nVidia RAID bios seemed to like that.

Now, I'm stuck at this point of Windows finding no hard drives. Hmm.

Though I have not had time to read it through or try to put it into use, I found this article at the nVidia website:

nVidia RAID how-to

Is this sufficient info? Is there something else very basic I might be missing?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Buzz

Suque, chaser of frisbee, terror of kitties and bunnies.

Tekara

Re: Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

Windows needs the drivers for the raid controller. When it first boots, windows will say something along the lines of "press f6 for custom drivers." It won't prompt for the drivers until the end so you'll have to be patient and wait. This does require a floppy disk with the drivers and a drive.

The alternative is to build a custom windows install disk with the drivers using a program like nlite.

"Computers are a lot like air conditioners - they both work great until you open windows." -Anonymous
"The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will agree to meet them halfway." -Bernard Avishai

Buzz Foster

Re: Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

What about deleting the RAID altogether, installing XP 64 to a single drive, and then recreating the RAID without discarding the data on the drive?
Will I just end up in the same place that I am now?

(Thank-you for the response, BTW.)

Suque, chaser of frisbee, terror of kitties and bunnies.

Lance_R

Re: Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

You have to use the f6 options to install the drivers, you can also use a USB drive to add the drivers if you do not have a floppy with Vista, not sure about XP.

If you installed on a single disk then mirrored it you would still need the drivers for the RAID software to function

Slacker

Re: Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

Some things I think that you should consider, first I would suggest using a drive that's not on your RAID array for your OS and programs. Because when a drive does fail, you'll loose your whole system, not just some data.

Second, get a third drive and run RAID 5 so that recovering from a drive fail is easy.

Third, get a second raid controller, if it's on your mainboard, get a spare mainboard, if your controller fails you'll loose everything if you don't have a spare controller. Chances are that when it does fail, they won't make the same controller anymore and you won't be able to recover your array. Another option along the same lines is to do software RAID in XP, then you'll never have to worry about the controller failing, as long as you get the drives hooked up in some way, doesn't matter how, you'll have access to your array.

Now to answer your original question, google search for a program called "nLite", it will allow you to burn an xp disk with your RAID controller drivers slipstreamed into the installation.

Just google search for "windows xp raid install" or "windows xp sata install" and you'll find instructions on what to do. That's what I had to do to install XP onto a laptop with a SATA drive, the instructions would be the same.

Buzz Foster

Re: Help with RAID!! (nVidia nForce and XP 64)

Jeff, does that work with XP 64?

Suque, chaser of frisbee, terror of kitties and bunnies.