SATA RAID newb help

[knight0334]

damn.... I dont know...

Something isn't right for sure. I've been pondering on the subject for awhile and scanned the 'net for similar issues. ...nothing.

let me sleep on it. been up since 7:30 yesterday morning and its now 6:53am.

[cauzomb]

I'm going through it changing something each time.... This time around I'm pressing F6 at setup, using foxconn's raid driver on a floppy disk, selecting nvidia raid class? then nvidia storage controller?, then instead of going back and pressing s again, I'm just letting it stand with those two selected, after that windows setup said "your drive is not connected" LOL next time I'll try pressing "S" selecting the drivers, then s again untill it promts to use the driver from the floppy.... From there I'm going to let XP partition the drive, instead of the WD partition utility. before I do this, I've read that xp can't partition over 32gb? I'm think WTF... I got up at 8 am, it's now 4 am... so uhm... yeah this is lame, I'm with you on the sleep thing.. I've only got a couple options left then I have to try them all over with a different sata raid driver... and or/bios flash.. If THAT doesn't work I'm going to boot single Uata and then load the raid controller drivers after xp is loaded on the single Uata. It may be just a lame driver, or because I can't use two of the sata connectors, 0 and 1; they are blocked by a capacitor on the videocard. My drives are hooked up to sata 2 and 3. I was out cleaning up brush, started to snap a branch and it exloded right in my face, all sorts of crap hit me right in the eyes at like 5 million miles an hour, so looking at the screen is a major strain... Everything is against me getting this chip n drives n video card tested out before the "replace/refund" time period....

[knight0334]

A cap exploded?


XP can partition over 32gb. SP2 is 48bit LBA which can read well into the terabytes.

I have my (2) Seagate 160gb drives(RAID 0) and my single WD 160g partitioned as such.

[cauzomb]

No busting caps!!!! I was busting dead branches off the side of a redwood and had all kindsa crap fly back in my face, most of it hit me in the eyes.. scratched the white and edge of the clear in my right eye

[cauzomb]

well, I tried all sorts of things to configure a bootable raid on this thing except for pulling my graphics card and using a pci s3 card so I could use sata 0 and sata 1 plugs... Since I don't want to do that, I've just plugged in my extra ATA drive and started installing 9x on one partition, then I'll install xp on the other partition, then install the raid drivers and just use it for Data storage/game loading/photo's etc.. I'm just doing this to get everything working for testing and burn in.. I'll Probly try again later with a low profile 90 degree sata connector on the motherboard, if I can find one that's got it's 90 pointing to 3 o-clock, rather than all the ones I'm finding that have the 90 pointing to 9 o-clock, I can use sata 0 and sata 1 with the big ol video card. Lot to bother with!!! now I gotta deal with compatability mode drivers, and windows 9x trying to re-load 32bit controller drivers after restarting... It kept halting, setting compatability mode, then restarting and reloading 32bit drivers, cause the cd was in the drive... I booted safe mode with the cd out of the drive then, disabled 32bit drivers in the file system, troubleshooting section, now it will stick to compatability mode till I get the chipset drivers loaded :P it looks like I am going to have to boot off a floppy and copy my chipset drivers in dos, or setup legacy cdrom drivers with Environmental variables, mscdex or whatever. This is Too much work LOL, I'm gonna unplug the sata drives, then disable them in bios till I get the damn drivers loaded.

[cauzomb]

welll...... windows 9x has no drivers for nf4, so scratch the dual boot thing, after going to protected mode drivers, I loose my cdrom, so I can't add anything to the 9x install without using a USB drive.. I'll leave it there to get a command prompt if I need one, oh and nf4 raid drivers have to be installed at the beginning of xp install using the f6 and drivers on the floppy, not like adding a driver for a pci add-in raid controller after the OS is installed, which you could do on 9x... so one more time around Nforce4 nvraid kinda sucks..

[cauzomb]

well, my last resort ended up with a stalled xp startup loading screen, reset ended up in xp fragging up my hard drive with checkdisk or whatever it was that decided I had 80megs of crosslinked files... back to square one except this time I have another attack; http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=51140 It turns out that NVRAID is just fine, it's actually Windows XP setup that sucks :P I'm going to make a slipstream unatended install disk using the guide above to see if that will fix it.

[cauzomb]

I'm back with the problem solved;

Long story short; (skip to the last paragraph)

I only have one floppy drive and two computers.... So this means the whole time I was moving the floppy drive back and forth between my old computer and the new motherboard.. I tried about 3 itterations of bios settings with 4 different driver versions, with about 3 other ways to install a different legacy driver pack and didn't get anywhere!!! This is alot of floppy drive swapping, unplugging/plugging in power cables etc.. Finally I stumbled on an abit nf4 sata raid guide that mentioned enable RAID GLOBALLY, on every device in the bios, IDE 1 primary, master/slave, IDE2 secondary, master/slave, sata1 primary secondary, sata2 primary secondary.. I had this set once before, but didn't try every driver pack with RAID set GLOBALLY.. So finally I was getting the xp txt setup F6 floppy drivers to load and recognize the array, but not my exact file system/partion information, instead of just saying no drives found etc.. this is progress, that is untill I couldn't get anymore headway with making a slipstream disc to test and install these driver versions.. In the middle of making some progress last week and then manually making a slipstream disc I managed to jumper my clear cmos to defaults, then re-enabled RAID only on the sata ports, so I was using an unworkable bios configuration and couldn't get my slipstream disc to work at all.... I had to start over, test each driver to find a good one, etc. And was seriously tired of swapping the floppy drive between computers..

So I gathered up all the drivers that I could remember seeing the raid array, then moved the whql signed driver packs of those over to a CD, Put the floppy drive back on the new board, booted a windows 9x boot floppy, brought the new cd containing all the whql driver versions over to the new pc's cdrom, then took out the boot floppy, put in a blank floppy, copied the contents from a whql signed nforce4 chipset driver pack's NVRAID folder onto the blank floppy, took out the cd, put in my windows disc, then rebooted... Press f6 at the setup screen, so I had to do this over and over about 3 times before I found the newest "latest" version that showed my exact file system rather than a bootable partition c and the rest unpartitioned space, alot of the other versions identified a C: partition and the rest of the array as unpartitioned space, so I don't want these, and didn't want the ones where after going through the f6 driver selection and pressing enter to contintue to setup windows, NO drives are found etc...

I made a note of which newest whql signed driver version was seeing ALL the partitions, commited those drivers along with a couple other applications that I had to download, isobuilder, nLite etc, onto a cdr, then moved all that over to a computer that has xp already running with dot net and a cdrw drive, then copied off my CD, applications/ driverer versions etc to a new folder on the hard drive of this other computer, installed Nlite, then programmed Nlite to import single raid drivers, as per that guide, then imported the rest of the nvidia chipset drivers, and finally used Nlite to weed out a bunch of international bloat, about 200megs worth of junk that nobody uses, clicked build iso, then burned a new slipstream disc and viala! now I'm into some burn in tests with my new computer. all I have to say is "W HAT T HE H ELL"

This wasn't fun, oh well, atleast I'm saving like 1000 bucks on a new kick ass PC