RAID boot problems after enabling 3rd hdd on computer

[edclay]

I have an MSI K8N Neo4 SLI board with three Hitachi 250gb SATAII harddrives installed. Two of the drives are using SATA channels one(1) and two(2) for a RAID 0 array. The 3rd drive is on SATA channel four(4). The third drive is not part of the array, it is simply going to be used for backup.

I installed Windows XP onto the RAID array while the 3rd drive was disabled in the BIOS. When the 3rd drive is enabled, the system will not boot. Windows gives an error about there being a problem with my harddrive configuration. My boot order is set to Floppy, CD, HDD, with the RAID array coming before the 3rd drive.

When the 3rd drive is disabled, everything works fine.

Some things I noticed are that when booting from the Windows CD, it lists the 3rd drive first and changes my RAID array to D/E. Also, the drives used in the RAID array do not get listed with the other drives during POST, but appear to be found after when the RAID utility does it's thing.

Has anyone experienced this problem or have heard of a way to correct this?

Thank you.

 

[BadThad]

I'm not familiar with the BIOS for that board, but I'm 90% certain you're missing something in there. The error you're seeing is probably the "NON SYSTEM DISK, INSERT BOOT DISK" error, right?

Take a closer look in your BIOS, you probably need to make the boot order different. If HDD is listed in the boot order, then it WILL try to boot from the non-RAID disk before the RAID array. You need to change the boot order to first boot from SATA RAID, OTHER DEVICE, RAID or something like that. A few BIOSes actually have another section for booting from the SATA RAID....do some more digging, this is your only problem....a BIOS setting.

 

[edclay]

Actually, the error I was recieving was "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. blahblahblah".

The boot order in the BIOS was correct as there is not an option for RAID or SATA RAID or the like, just simply HDD. But thank you for mentioning the BIOS because I too thought that's where the problem lied. After some hours of looking at the MSI webpage, I realized that the BIOS on my board was not really for my board, but the Platinum version of my board. After I flashed the correct and only BIOS listed for my board, it booted properly.

Thank you once again for hammering home the fact that this was a BIOS issue. Your help is greatly appreciated. 500gb of SATAII RAID 0 with a 250gb backup drive is pretty sweet.

 

[rasczak]

go into your raid manager at bootup. make sure that your array is set to boot. if it isn't then your array is not being sought first as your boot device.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: edclay
Actually, the error I was recieving was "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. blahblahblah".

The boot order in the BIOS was correct as there is not an option for RAID or SATA RAID or the like, just simply HDD. But thank you for mentioning the BIOS because I too thought that's where the problem lied. After some hours of looking at the MSI webpage, I realized that the BIOS on my board was not really for my board, but the Platinum version of my board. After I flashed the correct and only BIOS listed for my board, it booted properly.

Thank you once again for hammering home the fact that this was a BIOS issue. Your help is greatly appreciated. 500gb of SATAII RAID 0 with a 250gb backup drive is pretty sweet.

Good news! :thumbsup: