GA-8IRXP, RAID, and Windows XP problems

[ruel24]

This is my first experience with RAID. I'm not very successful so far... Here's what I have done so far: I've set up the array in the FastTrack utility. Everything is fine there. I setup the BIOS to boot floppy, then CDROM, then HDD 0. I've also tried floppy, CDROM, and SCSI and it didn't solve my problem either... Anyway, I fired up the XP disk, hit F6 at the appropriate time, loaded up the MBFastTrack Lite drivers for XP, and installed Windows XP. Upon reboot, I'm greeted with this:

"Windows XP could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

No matter what I've tried: changing the boot order, reinstalling it, etc. I keep getting this message. Anyone know what to do now? I'm sure a few of you have built on this board and are running RAID 0, like me, and may have had this similar problem. How do you fix it? Any help would be extremely appreciated! Thanks in advance...

 

[Popfreeze]

Rule24,
I have the same setup and it's working fine for me. What BIOS version are you using? Anything below F4 doesn't support booting from the raid controller. My board came with F3 BIOS installed, so I had to update the BIOS first. Hopes this helps.

 

[ruel24]

I have F3 installed. I've got F4 and F6, but I don't know how Gigabyte's BIOS flashes work. I assume I'm supposed to make a bootable floppy and install the files to boot to it, but I can't figure out how to create a bootable floppy from the Windows XP operating system on my other computer. "format a: \s" doesn't work in XP.

You've probably solved my problem, though. Thanks.

 

[ruel24]

I figured out the BIOS update via the QFlash utility. Duh! I've been getting so frustrated with this RAID thing that I couldn't think straight...

Anyway, after updating the BIOS, what does you boot order look like? It lists RAID (or SCSI?) boot order option, then 3 regular options. I want it to look for my floppy and CDROM first, of course, but what should the last option be? HDD 0? SCSI? or nothing?

My problem still exists... Could it be my BIOS setup? What could I be doing wrong here?

 

[Popfreeze]

My BIOS start order is Raid/SCSI, Floppy, HDD, CD. Are you sure the BIOS upgrade took? I created a MS-DOS boot disk in XP, used that to boot and had the F6 bios on another diskette which I popped in and flashed the BIOS with. The full manual on Gigabytes site is much better than the one that comes with the board, and goes into better detail on setting up the raid, flashing the BIOS, etc. These are the steps I took to build my PC:
1. Downloaded the F6 BIOS and the latest Raid drivers from gigabyte site.
2. Upgraded the BIOS.
3. Set up the Raid, ctrl + f during startup
4. Installed XP, hitting F6 to install the latest raid driver during setup.

I hope this helps!