Trouble with Older Board (NF7)

[EXCellR8]

So my most recent waste of time is trying to set up a spare machine with an older motherboard, my old Abit NF7-S 2.0 that I've had forever, and some pretty basic storage. I have a few SATA drives, two identical and with matching capacities, and some other old tech I wanted to throw in. Seemed like a great idea at the time, one that would only take a few hours or so, but it's proved to be anything but quick and easy...

First, I installed Windows XP on an IDE drive and set up my RAID array in BIOS with a cluster size of 16k. This was basically so I could format the striped array from within windows and set the allocation size manually etc. I then figured I could use Acronis to clone the partition on the IDE drive over to the RAID-0 set and it would work just fine. Wrong.

No matter what I do I can't boot the RAID array... but I can boot from a SINGLE SATA drive if on the SATA_1 port. I've tried selecting SCSI and SATA options from the boot settings but neither works to boot the striped drives and I'm just getting frustrated at this point. I have no idea what BIOS the board has or whether or not that's even the issue. I would try to reinstall Windows directly to the striped set but I feel like the same thing is going to happen--plus the data on the RAID array is the exact clone of the IDE drive, which is now not installed.

I figure someone on here must know this specific board and it's primitive SATA ports better than I... so does anyone know what I can do? At this point if it's not something that's gonna take me 20 minutes or so I might as well just put it away for another day. I've already invested too much time and it's been wayyyyy more trouble than it's worth now.

 

[nenforcer]

Those are SATA I 1.5GBps ports on a third party controller (Silicon Image?) on that board.

ABIT also bit the dust a couple of years ago so good luck finding the latest BIOS (which you probably already do have since that board is so old).

Are you using Windows XP SP2 or later which has native support for SATA devices?

 

[Elixer]

Heh, I also have that board gathering dust. No idea if it works or not.
I know they had BIOS issues with getting RAID working correctly, but, seeing as they are dead, you are going to have to find that BIOS file that fixes RAID it seems.

 

[EXCellR8]

Yes I am aware that pretty much all support for the board has ceased... but it was one of the most popular socket A boards back in the day so I figured someone, possibly a past user, might know something.

The board has two 1.5Gbps sata ports and uses a Sil3112 controller I believe. I can't figure out which BIOS version I have but I'll try flashing to the latest. Abit's site is 90% down and I had to find the BIOS elsewhere, but they are official.

I may just end up using the RAID array for storage and boot from a PATA drive. The performance is barely noticeable at best so at this point I'm just looking to have it working. The array was fine when I wasn't trying to boot from it...

Thanks for the input.