Setting up RAID on Chaintech NForce 250 VNF3-250???

[BlindBartimaeus]

Did you try without the 3rd Harddrive and disable the other IDE?

I would start there. I had a similar problem, and it corrected it for me.

 

[Schnieds]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
Athlon 64 2800+ (Low on Funds )
Thermalright HSF (I forget the number, but there's only one for it) + Vantec Tornado 92mm
Arctic Silver 5
Chaintech VNF3-250
Mushkin PC3200 Black Perf L1 2x512MB 2-2-2-7
2x WD Raptor 75GB
2x Maxtor 160GB 7500rpm
Sapphire ATI Radeon x800 Pro
ATI Remote Wonder Pro Capture Card
Nu Tech DDW-0082
Thermaltake Xaser PSU 560W

I don't think it's a heat or power issue. If I do not load the drivers, it works fine. The system has no overheating problems, and it only restarts when I try to load the nvidia RAID drivers. The system does reboot when the drivers are loaded, but if we do not load the drivers, we are able to proceed through the installation fine.

Oh, and another weird thing totally unrelated ... the maxtor drives came preloaded with some version of linux on them ... even partitioned for linux. It was weird.

Ok, try this setup:

SATA 1: WD Raptor
SATA 2: WD Raptor
Primary IDE Master: Disabled
Primary IDE Slave: Disabled
Secondary IDE Master: None
Secondary IDE Slave: CD-ROM or DVD-ROM to install with.

Give that a try and see if that takes care of the problem... which I think it will, it seemed to work for myself and BlindBartimaeus.

If that works to install, then after Windows is installed use the following configuration:

SATA 1: WD Raptor
SATA 2: WD Raptor
Primary IDE Master: None
Primary IDE Slave: Maxtor 160GB
Secondary IDE Master: CD-ROM or DVD-ROM
Secondary IDE Slave: Maxtor 160GB

Let us know if it works...

Also, is it just rebooting, or are you getting a BSOD?

 

[Aikouka]

I thought you said you disabled the secondary channel, though? But in your post above, you mentioned to put the DVD-RW on the secondary IDE (as slave.)

Oh, and we decided since we couldn't get it to install last night, we would just install windows xp normally on the SATA drive, and I discovered another weird oddity about this motherboard and another about windows XP. I hooked up all the drives again, and then realized that the DVD-RW wasn't showing up in windows. I thought it was very weird, since we had just installed windows XP from the drive. After a lot of tinkering, I just gave up and took the DVD drive out of my PC (since I brought mine to my friend's house.) After hooking up that drive, it worked fine and we were able to install drivers.

I tried hooking up the DVD-RW to my machine and it just caused Windows XP to not boot, where it just stayed at the loading screen with the green bar at the bottom going across and sometimes the bar would freeze. I think that was just my fault and I ignored the CDRW drive's settings, because when I disconnected my CDRW drive, the DVD-RW worked fine in windows. Then I remembered that I got one of those Security Update CDs from Microsoft, so I went through and installed SP1 and all the updates after it. Then I hooked up the DVD-RW and it worked just fine. So, I assume that to use a DVD-RW, Windows XP requires SP1.

The other weird thing I found is that after I had all the drives connected, I installed some of the drivers (including the nForce drivers) so I decided "Hey, let's turn on the RAID 0 for the Maxtors." Well, once I turned the RAID on for the two drives on the primary IDE (the two maxtors) it refused to boot the SATA. It just kept trying to boot from the LAN and then gave me a "Insert System Disk" error.

To try out your other idea, I might try it with the two SATAs plugged in but NOT raided and then the DVD-RW as secondary slave. Then I'll try and load the RAID drivers with RAID enabled, but as I mentioned, not enabled for any of the drives. Should this work as well as a way to test if it works? Because if we can make it work, then my friend is willing to lose all he's set up so far.

Like I mentioned above, it is just rebooting and not BSOD'ing.

Thanks,
Will K.

 

[Schnieds]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
I thought you said you disabled the secondary channel, though? But in your post above, you mentioned to put the DVD-RW on the secondary IDE (as slave.)

Oh, and we decided since we couldn't get it to install last night, we would just install windows xp normally on the SATA drive, and I discovered another weird oddity about this motherboard and another about windows XP. I hooked up all the drives again, and then realized that the DVD-RW wasn't showing up in windows. I thought it was very weird, since we had just installed windows XP from the drive. After a lot of tinkering, I just gave up and took the DVD drive out of my PC (since I brought mine to my friend's house.) After hooking up that drive, it worked fine and we were able to install drivers.

I tried hooking up the DVD-RW to my machine and it just caused Windows XP to not boot, where it just stayed at the loading screen with the green bar at the bottom going across and sometimes the bar would freeze. I think that was just my fault and I ignored the CDRW drive's settings, because when I disconnected my CDRW drive, the DVD-RW worked fine in windows. Then I remembered that I got one of those Security Update CDs from Microsoft, so I went through and installed SP1 and all the updates after it. Then I hooked up the DVD-RW and it worked just fine. So, I assume that to use a DVD-RW, Windows XP requires SP1.

The other weird thing I found is that after I had all the drives connected, I installed some of the drivers (including the nForce drivers) so I decided "Hey, let's turn on the RAID 0 for the Maxtors." Well, once I turned the RAID on for the two drives on the primary IDE (the two maxtors) it refused to boot the SATA. It just kept trying to boot from the LAN and then gave me a "Insert System Disk" error.

To try out your other idea, I might try it with the two SATAs plugged in but NOT raided and then the DVD-RW as secondary slave. Then I'll try and load the RAID drivers with RAID enabled, but as I mentioned, not enabled for any of the drives. Should this work as well as a way to test if it works? Because if we can make it work, then my friend is willing to lose all he's set up so far.

Like I mentioned above, it is just rebooting and not BSOD'ing.

Thanks,
Will K.

Sorry, didn't mean to confuse you. You are right, I did say to disable the secondary channel. The way I described above to set things up is the way that I have seen multiple other people get it all working since I intially got it set up. I figured that since I had heard of mutiple other people using the above setup and it working, it might be better than the way I initially described it.

However, just for reference here is the exact setup I used to get my system working:

SATA RAID: Enabled
SATA 1: WD 74GB (RAID 0)
SATA 2: WD 74GB (RAID 0)
Primary IDE Master: None
Primary IDE Slave: DVD-RW
Secondary IDE: Disabled

After I installed my Windows system I moved my IDE HDD to the Primary IDE Slave spot and the DVD-RW to the Secondary IDE Slave spot.

I would try either ot the two methods I described above and see if that does it for you, it should work no problemo...

Schnieds

 

[Gortok]

Originally posted by: Quino
Gortok, when you did lower the latency to 3 did the mobo started to beep ...

Yep, also with it set at 4's (ie. 8-4-4-2.5). It don't like that...

 

[grabbingsand]

Okay.

Let me add my sad, sad story.

I've thrown together an AMD64 3000+, this Chaintech VNF3-250 and a WD 160GB SATA drive.

Could someone please tell me exactly what I need to have configured in the BIOS to make this work? I can boot from the WinXP CD, it goes through the motions of installation, it even claims to partition the drive, but after the initial run, it restarts and stops cold after "Verifying DMI" ... Non-System Boot Disk.

I am only using the one SATA drive, but do I still need to install the NVidia RAID drivers during the install?

UPDATE: YES! And no. See, I have no RAID aspirations, but I was selecting both of the drivers during F6. This resulted in the installer missing the drive completely. Not good. So I tried picking just the NForce Storage driver and not the RAID Driver. Bingo.

Here is what I've done in the BIOS:
Integrated Peripherals / IDE Function Setup / OnChip IDE Channel0 [Enabled]
Integrated Peripherals / IDE Function Setup / OnChip IDE Channel1 [Disabled]
Integrated Peripherals / IDE Function Setup / Serial-ATA 2 (Internal PHY) [Enabled]
Integrated Peripherals / IDE Function Setup / RAID Config / IDE Raid [Enabled]
Integrated Peripherals / IDE Function Setup / RAID Config / SATA0 Master RAID [Enabled] (rest are Disabled)
Advanced BIOS Features / First Boot Device [Floppy]
Advanced BIOS Features / Second Boot Device [CDROM]
Advanced BIOS Features / Third Boot Device [HDD-0]

See, the Boot Device options bother me too, because there is no SATA to choose in the list. I thought perhaps SCSI, but that's not working either.

If anyone can offer their advice, I'll take it. And feel free to hit me on IM. (grabbingsand)

 

[Agamar]

I don't have my raptor in a raid, just single, and winxp never needed the driver for it.

 

[Shyatic]

Thanks for all this information in here... hopefully it will work when I get home and try to set up my RAID devices.

 

[FunkierThanU]

Well, I'm still not exactly sure why it worked, but I've managed to set up an SATA RAID and have a regular hard drive on the system. It's kinda @ss-backwards...XP sees the IDE drive as the first logical drive and insists on putting BOOT.INI, NTLOADer and other XP boot files on it no matter how I tried to set up partitions.

Primary Master and Slave : Disabled

Secondary Master: WD 80GB
Secondary Slave: Samsung CD-RW drive

SATA 0: 74GB Raptor
SATA 1: 74GB Raptor

I was little groggy when I tried this and it took me awhile to catch on; I had the SCSI (the RAID) as the first boot device, then the floppy and finally the CD drive. For some reason when I took the XP CD out of the drive the system would stop booting up successfully. I finally figured out it was looking at the Secondary IDE Controller to boot, not the RAID, seeing the bootable CD, starting up and then going to the RAID. After figuring that out, I made HDD-0 the first boot device, it booted... It sees the NTLDR and the stuff on the IDE HD, which points it the RAID.
Kinda goofy. And I can't get my Maxtor 120GB to do the same thing in the place of the 80GB WD.

I think how I got it to work initially was by telling the BIOS that the Secondary Master IDE was disabled. XP install sees it anyway and then instists on putting the boot files on it even when I try to only create a partition on the RAID.

Everything still runs off the RAID, and the I just use the IDE for storage. And Booting. Which kinda sucks... makes my system integrity rely on the crumby 80GB Western Digital IDE drive not dying...

Anyone else able to replicate this? I've been watching a couple different boards, and I think this is the first I've seen of someone getting a regular harddrive working alongside a RAID on this board.