Please Help Setting Up RAID

[ohnnyj]

Hello all:

I am trying to setup my new system with an ASUS A8N-SLI board and I want to RAID-0 my two raptors. However, when I am trying to install WinXP I load the nVidia drivers from the disk for RAID but when it gets to the Setup is Starting Windows portion it restarts itself. I have narrowed this issue down to the RAID since if I do not load the drivers then the setup continues like it should.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[ohnnyj]

Please, anybody? I have tried everything I can think of.

 

[mechBgon]

Section 5 of your Asus manual should help, they go through it step by step.

 

[ohnnyj]

I went through that already. I made a disk with the nvidia drivers on it and then during the WinXP setup I hit F6, loaded both drivers, continued the setup, then it gets to the point where it says Starting Windows Setup (and then it should give you the EULA agreement) but instead it restarts the computer.

 

[Rhin0]

OMG teh Raid-0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ohnnyj]

I know I know, everyone says what a pain it can be. But I prefer not to dwell on the negative and have hope for a positive future.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: ohnnyj
I went through that already. I made a disk with the nvidia drivers on it and then during the WinXP setup I hit F6, loaded both drivers, continued the setup, then it gets to the point where it says Starting Windows Setup (and then it should give you the EULA agreement) but instead it restarts the computer.

Try it again. Start on page 5-23 of your manual, taking special note of step 2. Make sure that your two drives are plugged into SATA1 and SATA2 since these are among the SATA plugs operated by the nVidia southbridge, rather than the Silicon Image tacked-on PCI SATA RAID controller. Create your array in the nVidia RAID BIOS as Asus shows, then do Windows Setup.


edit: read page 2-21 closely too.

 

[Redmasc]

Hi there, I'm having the exact same problem as you are right now. What did you do to resolve this issue? I'm running on an fx53 with 2 36GB raptors on raid 0 on the nvidia chipset. Everytime I load the 2 drivers for the raid that it asks for, it loads some small windows files but then when it says windows is starting or something like that, it stays there for a while and then I get a blue screen and forced to reset. I've tried new the downloads from asus.com and tried the ones from the cd. i've updated the bios and still no luck. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[D1gger]

There are three steps to setting up the RAID system on the ASUS board.

1) Enable the RAID controller in the motherboard BIOS
2) Setup the RAID array during POST by hitting TAB or DEL or whatever your RAID controller requires
3) Loading the SATA driver during the WIN/XP installation.

If you miss any of these steps it won't work.

 

[Redmasc]

I got all those steps in. I've setup up a raid before on my abit IC7 max3 board. Its just that on this setup, with everything in bios checking out fine and my array set up, it freezes when windows installation tries to process after the raid drivers are installed. It says that it requires 2 drivers, the controller and the actual driver. I've loaded both and it fails. Personally I think that its the drivers themselves. If I don't hit F6 during windows setup, it loads fine. It only freezes AFTER I try to load the raid drivers. Anyone figure a way around this problem? I don't want to resort to the silicon image, I wanna stick with nvidia raid for max performance. Thanks guys.