HELP! New SN95G5, can't install the OS

[ACWingit]

I just put together the following:

shuttle xpc sn95g5 (bios FN95S205)
Corsair XMS3200XL (matched pair 1g total, 2.2.2.5 latency)
Radeon X800 Pro
2 Seagate Barracuda SATA drives
1 MadDog DVD recorder
Athlon 64 3500+

My intent was to use the two drives as RAID 1 (i.e. mirrored).

Problem 1:
Followed instructions in Nvidia RAID manual.
Enabled RAID 1 in BIOS and told it to use the 2 SATA drives.
Began to load windows
Press f6 to load RAID drivers
...was totally ignored
eventually it said "setup cannot determine the type of one or more storage devices....."
now I could press S to choose the RAID drivers.
Chose NVIDIA RAID CLASS DRIVER (K7-WIN XP)
it loaded nvraid.sys
Press S
Chose NVIDIA Nforce Storage Controller (K7-Win XP)
....system locked up......managed to solve this by making a new floppy with raid stuff......
so it all loaded up fine.

Put Win Xp Pro disk in cd drive

Problem 2:
Goes thru the "setup is loading files...."
then thru "setup is starting windows..."
Then "to set up xp press enter..."
There was one disk partition listed (which made sense since I set the RAID up as a mirror)
Chose to format that partition.
got: "Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged..."
Tried a few more times (with a couple version of xp)
Failure.

Back in the BIOS, disabled the RAID
Back into Windows install
Back to the point where I get to choose a partition to format.
This time there are 2 partitions shown - one for the C drive and one for D (as expected)
Chose C
Got: "Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged..."

Downloaded and ran the Seagate SeaTools test on the hard drives - just the quick test and the controller test. All passed with flying colors. So the disks seem to be ok and installed properly.

Now what?

Thanks for the help in advance!

 

[Stark]

nice system.

how about removing the C: drive, plugging the D: drive into that spot, then installing on the other drive. Maybe just one of the drives is screwed up.

I was ablt to install XP on my box the way you describe in Problem 1. Windows isn't doing something dumb like seeing the cardreader as a drive? I had that issue and my raid1 partition ended up as the F: drive on my system. It's a little annoying, but not too bad.

 

[ACWingit]

Well, I managed to get one of the drives formatted and win xp installed.
I had to use Seagate's diskwizard tool to first format and setup the drive as NTFS (I used the bootable version of the program).
After that, windows recognized it just fine and had no trouble installing the OS.

Haven't tried setting up a RAID yet tho.