Help with boot/partition problems

[link1305]

I finally got my system working again after about 6 hours of formatting, installing windows. To make a long story short, i have 2 60 gig maxtor drives in RAID0 using the onboard controller on my MSI KT333 mobo. I also ahve one 80gig wb drive for backups. I installed windows XP pro on my RAID array.

I went to the storage management console in administrator tools to partition my drives for games/media/downloads ect., and it shows two partitions already there. For some reason D:\ has the windows files on it (D:\windows and documents and settings) and C: only has the startup files on it (boot.ini, config.sys,ntldr). It so happens that C:\ is on my 80 gig drive, and D:\ is on the array. So in my BIOS i have to have it set to boot from my 80gig drive, otherwise it says "ntldr missing". Is there a way to put all those startup files on my Main drive so i can just have one partition for windows? Can I just drag and drop them there?

Also, in storage management is says C:\ is the "system" drive and D:\ is the "boot" drive

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Lord Evermore]

This'd be more appropriate in the OS or Tech Support forums (not that I'd expect much response there either).

A long time ago when I tried an external IDE controller (and haven't needed one for a long time), I found that having a hard drive on the on-chip controller would prevent booting from the add-on controller. (Although your RAID controller is "onboard", it's technically an external controller, not integrated into the primary chipset.)

Now of course, with the BIOS integrated with the external chipset BIOS, you can tell it to boot from the secondary controller. But, if you didn't have it set to do that originally, when you installed Windows, then the setup program would see the RAID array as your secondary drive, and the 80GB as your primary. WindowsXP and 2K and NT all require certain boot files to be on the primary drive, even if the OS files are on a different drive.

I don't THINK you can simply copy the files over, because you can't use "sys.com" on the D drive, as it would try to put the WinME DOS system files on, as if you were trying to make a bootable floppy. It seems like you'll need to reinstall WinXP, or possibly use a recovery tool to make Windows think you're "fixing" your D drive.

 

[Kartajan]

Try this:

Remove "backup" drive.
Install w/ only the RAID drives in the system.
Once Win is running, re- install "backup", ensuring that BIOS is set to boot to the array (probably calls it SCSI in bios..)

works?

<<this guess is from a non- raid user..>>