SATA Raid and installing Windows XP issues

lokiju

Lifer
May 29, 2003
18,526
5
0
I can't for the life of me figure this one out.

I have a Abit NF7-S Ver2 Mobo with an AMD XP 3200+ Barton and am using two 120GB Seagate SATA drives in a Raid 0 setup with two partitions, one partition is 20GB and is for the OS and the other is the remainder to store data. When I boot off of the Windows XP CD it will allow me to create my partitions and format the 20GB partition using NTFS then do the final process of copying over the files to the hard drive for setup, it then reboots, does the normal POST and then where it should kick into the rest of the setup, it just goes to a blank screen and sits there with no activity at all from the system for about 10 mins, then brings up an error message that says "boot.ini missing" then below that C:\Windows and all I can do is power it off.

I am totally lost and have no idea how to solve this issue. I've made sure that the memory passes the memory check during POST, I've removed any additional drives and items not needed at the time, such as my IDE drive, and other CD ROM, and all USB devices etc..

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 

Double Trouble

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,270
103
106
Early in the installation process, windows will have a line at the bottom of the screen saying something to the effect of "press F6 to install third party SCSI device drivers" (or something similar). At that point, you have to hit F6, and provide windows with the required drivers for your RAID controller on a floppy. Without those drivers, windows will not be able to "see" the boot.ini and other installation files required to proceed because it can't access the raid array --- and it will blue-screen.

More info here: Install info for intel chipsets
 

lokiju

Lifer
May 29, 2003
18,526
5
0
I did do the F6 option, its detectes my Drive no problem, the problem is after it formats and copies over the windows setup it does the reboot and just sits at a blank screen I have no other IDE Hard drive hooked up and only 1 IDE CD Rom to do the install from. Thats where I'm having the issue.
 

vietofmars

Senior member
Nov 20, 2001
363
0
0
Try install without RAID. If one drive craps out your screwed. SATA should be fast enough as it is. You ain't running a database or anything right?

from abit site:
RAID-0 is much like RAID-linear, except that the component partitions are divided into stripes and then interleaved. Like RAID-linear, the result is a single larger virtual partition. Also like RAID-linear, it offers no redundancy, and therefore decreases overall reliability: a single disk failure will knock out the whole thing. RAID-0 is often claimed to improve performance over the simpler RAID-linear. However, this may or may not be true, depending on the characteristics to the file system, the typical size of the file as compared to the size of the stripe, and the type of workload. The ext2fs file system already scatters files throughout a partition, in an effort to minimize fragmentation. Thus, at the simplest level, any given access may go to one of several disks, and thus, the interleaving of stripes across multiple disks offers no apparent additional advantage. However, there are performance differences, and they are data, workload, and stripe-size dependent.
 

Double Trouble

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,270
103
106
Hmmm..... I'm not sure what's going on there. Normally though, if you are using RAID or a SCSI controller that requires drivers, windows will copy the files etc just fine -- it's after the reboot that you get a problem. It's not a blank screen though, you normally get the blue screen dump, so you're seeing something different.

Sounds like an issue with the drivers for that particular controller / mobo though. Have you tried turning off the ACPI function in the bios and then installing? On some boards that's an issue. How about trying to install on just one of the SATA drives (instead of raid) to see if that works. If it does, then you know you can narrow it down to a problem with the raid controller or drivers.