Nforce4 RAID won't install on WinXP

[penelopeb]

Greetings:

I've been unsuccessfully trying to install NVRAID for the past day on my new a8n-sli board. Here's a synopsis, any insight would be greatly appreciated.

System setup is 2 75GB SATA Raptors, in Nvidia RAID ports 1 and 2.

I have them set up in the NVRAID utility as a mirror, which is reported healthy. I've made my driver disk from the motherboard CD. I boot off the XP CD, and hit F6, installing both drivers as requested. When the blue and white text based portion of the setup gets done installing all the manufacturer drivers, and it says 'starting windows' just before it should start copying files, the screen goes blank, the keyboard flashes, the screen comes back on, and then it reboots.

I tried the same scenario with XP 64 bit and at the same time, I get a STOP error that says something like 'machine check exception'.

If I remove the mirror and turn off NVRAID, I can install and run Windows fine, on either drive. So the drives aren't hosed.

I have tried installing Windows, and THEN installing the drivers, and this results in a lock at boot...with the Windows XP graphic loading logo stuck in a sort of 1/4 lighted (very very dim) and a machine lock. Booting with last known good config, fixes it.

I'd almost swear there's something conflicty w/ my vid card. Single PCIE X300. No, I don't have anything else to test with. :-(

I've tried Nvidia RAID ports 3 and 4 with the same problem.

Help?

Thanks!!!

 

[richardnewlove]

Are all the RAID options correctly set up in the BIOS? Not familiar with the board itself, but you may have to enable each SATA device separately in the BIOS.
Just a thought, hopefully you've gone through the BIOS already.

 

[penelopeb]

as far as i can tell, yes. i've got the controller that the SATA drives are on enabled, and in the RAID utility I have those two drives set to allow nvidia raid. the SI raid chip is disabled.

*sigh*

thank you

 

[Uncle Bob]

have you tried (as an experiment) setting up a Raid-0 array instead?

lots of people over in the Motherboards forum Official ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4) Thread are reporting rigs include WD Raptors running in Raid 0, so that certainly seems possible..
Only one or two people are claiming to be running Raid-1 but that's almost certainly due to the fact that people buying this board at the moment are more likely to be interested in speed rather than fault tolerance.

One clue may be in the phrase you use "... and hit F6, installing both drivers as requested" which suggests you're installing both the nvraid and silicon raid drivers. assuming you don't have anything attached to the silicon raid controller - I'd suggest you disable it in the bios and don't install a driver.

edit: just seen your comment on how the SI raid is disabled...

 

[penelopeb]

yeah, in order to install nvidia RAID, you have to install a raid driver and a storage controller driver.

i'm baffled.

i have not tried a raid 0 array. i think i'll give that a go when i get home.

i really wanted RAID 1. i do a lot of work from home, and one can never have too much backup... i don't think it's going to work though. it's the driver it's choking on, I'm sure of it. :\

 

[Uncle Bob]

Not having seen one of these boards, I'm not speaking with certainty, but...

is it possible that you don't need both drivers, that it's an either, or situation...

e.g you install the storage controller driver for a non-raid setup
and
you install the raid driver in the other case


???

 

[penelopeb]

every 'how-to' i've seen says you install both, including the manual. and when you go to the disk it has a little (required) next to each of them.

i'm about to scream. :-D

 

[Uncle Bob]

yeah, an FAQ on the ASUS website says install both, but interestingly cites the reason as ' in case the system cannot detect the HDD'

Out of interest, what other devices (IDE/Sata) do you have and how are they connected & configured?

 

[penelopeb]

i finally gave up and installed the sillicon RAID and it worked like a charm. sucks. i wanted to use the nvidia. other devices are a 160gb plain jane IDE maxtor and an IDE generic DVD-RW

 

[Rande]

I've got almost the same problem. New mobo (Asus A8N-sli) and I'd like to use the integrated SATA RAID but it won't install properly.

The SATA RAID controller is set to "enabled" in the BIOS for each of 2 disks (74GB Raptors). The BIOS RAID utility properly sees the two as one striped array (RAID 0).

When I Go to install Win2k, I press F6 for third party raid controllers and put in the floppy I created from the mobo drivers CD. Windows then offers to use the RAID drivers from the floppy. If I choose both RAID and Mass Storage drivers on the floppy, Windows says "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer." If I only choose the RAID driver it then proceeds to show me the two disk drives instead of one, to install to.

There is the on-board Silicon Image RAID as well (which I've used successfully with other boards in the past), but I really wanted to try out the integrated nVidia controller.

Any ideas?

BTW - is there an advantage to using the integrated nVRAID SATA controller over the on-board S.I. one?


-Rande-
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[genius99]

Have you had any luck? I am having problems too

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=32&threadid=1560623&enterthread=y