Last week a buddy of mine bought a DFI LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb to be the core of his new gaming rig. He bought a pair of SATA WD 200GB drives that he wants to RAID 0 together. However, he seems to be having the same problem that xclusivex had in this thread except we cannot seem to get past it.
The basic machine assembly was straight-forward and the machine POSTs fine. The SATA drives appear on the first screen of the bios. After turning on raid and going into the raid bios and setting them up for raid 0 they no longer show up on the initial bios screen and the raid bios screen shows the raider drive. So far so good.
When we try to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP Pro it does not seem to see the raid array. We hit F6 at the beginning of installation, we install both the storage and raid drivers off the floppy, and when windows setup gets to the part where you pick the disk it shows two 200GB disks. The only strange thing is the first one has a little less space than the second. We've tried several things such as resetting the BIOS using the jumper, swapping out the cables, tried both the internal (ports 3 and 4) and external (ports 1 and 2) SATA ports on the motherboard. We've even tried going across both controllers (ports 1 and 3). Al have the same result.
Next we tried removing the SATA drives and tried raiding two 60GB PATA drive but had the same problem. He's downloaded the latest drivers from DFI and NVIDIA and even tried flashing his motherboard bios to no avail.
Convinced it was a motherboard problem he returned the motherboard for another one. However, the new motherboard has the same problem. Here's another data point. After swapping motherboards on the initial boot the drives were raided. Obviously it could not have gotten the information out of the bios so it must have gotten it off of the drives. I had him boot off of a Win98 floppy and run fdisk /mbr, fdisk /mbr 0 and fdisk /mbr 1 and reset the BIOS. The drives were no longer raided but after he set them up they still has the same problem.
One last data point. If we boot Partition Magic 8 on the machine it sees the raid drive. We can partition it and format it with NTFS with no problems, but when we try to install WinXP Pro and install the NForce 3 drivers (storage and raid) the installer still sees it as two disks.
Any ideas? Have we missing anything obvious (or not obvious)?
The basic machine assembly was straight-forward and the machine POSTs fine. The SATA drives appear on the first screen of the bios. After turning on raid and going into the raid bios and setting them up for raid 0 they no longer show up on the initial bios screen and the raid bios screen shows the raider drive. So far so good.
When we try to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP Pro it does not seem to see the raid array. We hit F6 at the beginning of installation, we install both the storage and raid drivers off the floppy, and when windows setup gets to the part where you pick the disk it shows two 200GB disks. The only strange thing is the first one has a little less space than the second. We've tried several things such as resetting the BIOS using the jumper, swapping out the cables, tried both the internal (ports 3 and 4) and external (ports 1 and 2) SATA ports on the motherboard. We've even tried going across both controllers (ports 1 and 3). Al have the same result.
Next we tried removing the SATA drives and tried raiding two 60GB PATA drive but had the same problem. He's downloaded the latest drivers from DFI and NVIDIA and even tried flashing his motherboard bios to no avail.
Convinced it was a motherboard problem he returned the motherboard for another one. However, the new motherboard has the same problem. Here's another data point. After swapping motherboards on the initial boot the drives were raided. Obviously it could not have gotten the information out of the bios so it must have gotten it off of the drives. I had him boot off of a Win98 floppy and run fdisk /mbr, fdisk /mbr 0 and fdisk /mbr 1 and reset the BIOS. The drives were no longer raided but after he set them up they still has the same problem.
One last data point. If we boot Partition Magic 8 on the machine it sees the raid drive. We can partition it and format it with NTFS with no problems, but when we try to install WinXP Pro and install the NForce 3 drivers (storage and raid) the installer still sees it as two disks.
Any ideas? Have we missing anything obvious (or not obvious)?
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