P5W DH EZ-RAID Problem

[Twitch22]

Hello everyone.

Finished putting my new rig together last night. Got to POST just fine, configured my RAM settings and adjusted BIOS settings to auto-detect my drives.

I have 2 Seagate 7200.10 320 Gig HDs installed on the EZ-Backup SATA ports. I used Seagate's DiscWizard utility to partition my drives. DiscWizard showed only one 320 Gig volume, so I assume the EZ RAID is working correctly. I do not believe that DiscWizard actually formatted the drives...perhaps left for the XP install to do?

When I try to install XP Pro, I get to the message that Windows does not detect any hard drives in my system. I'm not sure how to solve this. The Asus manual simply says to prepare two identical HDs, install them on the EZ-Backup SATA ports and install XP Pro. Once XP boots, then install EZ-Backup software.

Is it possible to even install XP this way, off the EZ-Backup array? If it is, what am I doing wrong? If not, how should I proceed?

Thanks for any thoughts or tips!

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[Twitch22]

UUummmm...after some more research on Asus's forums, is the fact that my only copy of XP Pro is before SP-2 have something to do with my install hang up?

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[bloodthirster]

You need to load a raid driver. Right at the beginning XP asks you to push one of the F keys to load a Raid or other Hard disk controller driver.

 

[Twitch22]

Okay. Decided to give up RAID and just run the 2 Seagates as "normal" drives. Windows still will not complete the install. The partitions and drives are listed properly, I can pick which drive and partition I want to install to. The set-up goes through the transferring of files, etc. all the way to the re-boot. After my rig re-boots, windoes goes through the initial set-up all over again, where I have to pick the drive, pick the partiton, etc.

I tried just booting up without the CD in place to see if the HD would boot, but I got a "Failed to load operating system" error.

Any thoughts?

 

[Indyboy2]

if installing on the orange ports on the motherboard no f6 drivers are needed as it uses the Silicon Image 4723 Hardware RAID controller .From the factory the jumpers are set to raid 1 by default and yes you can boot of the ez raid with no problem just set it up in the bios .Im assuming you want to run a raid 1 if not set the set the jumpers accordingly.And i would bet on you need service pack 2 to solve your problems.I had my two raptors on the ez raid ports for a while but went to an areca 1210 and the performance difference was substantional

 

[Twitch22]

Originally posted by: Indyboy2
if installing on the orange ports on the motherboard no f6 drivers are needed as it uses the Silicon Image 4723 Hardware RAID controller .From the factory the jumpers are set to raid 1 by default and yes you can boot of the ez raid with no problem just set it up in the bios .Im assuming you want to run a raid 1 if not set the set the jumpers accordingly.And i would bet on you need service pack 2 to solve your problems.I had my two raptors on the ez raid ports for a while but went to an areca 1210 and the performance difference was substantional

Thanks for the info!! After much exhaustion (not to mention re-installs!), I just installed my two drives to the Intel SATA ports as regular IDE drives. I suspect the fact that I was installing a copy of XP Pro without SP2 is the main reason I couldn't get it to work right. Oh well....I'm going to upgrade to Vista once it goes retail anyway!

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