Urgent Help Required.......

[rich0684]

Hi,

I offered to take my friends PC on monday and format his hard drive and reinstall windows XP. I had recently done it to my machine and had all the necessary boot CD etc. When i was at his house and looking at the machine, within XP i could see two drives.....C:Storage drive and F:Win_XP. He said he didn't know why c: wasnt his windows drive. Anyway the C: storage was showing just under 100GB and the F:Win_XP was showing just under 20GB. When i took the computer apart yesterday, it turns out that there are two 120GB western hard drives, and when i hooked them up to my PC they have identical files on each! They are both partitioned 100Gb and 20Gb and have C:storage and F:win_xp. So i put one to one side as there are files needed in the storage section. The other drive i formatted through windows.

The motherboard is a gigabyte GA FN400pro 2 and the hard drives were connected to IDE2 and IDE3 via seperate cables. When i put the formatted drive in on its own, it comes up with a RAID config error and asks me to go into the RAID setup to sort it out. When i do this using the automatic detection option set to "RAID 0", it asks me to select a different config and try again. The only config that works for the single drive is "normal". But then it lists the hard drive as un-used and i cannot do anything with it.
If i connect both HDD's back as they were when i got the computer home it will setup with config "RAID 0" but when i run the Windows XP setup, it says no hard drives were installed on the system. My last ditch attempt was to use a boot cd and format the drive again through dos and create the primary dos partition etc. I did this once and forgot the "/s" on the format c: command. I presume this stopped the formatted drive being bootable. So i tried to format a second time with the right command and i now get "not enough memory to format, operation cancelled". So i am left with a formatted drive and i cant do a thing with it!!! the other drive as far as i know is still in tact with the F:Win_XP and C:storage partitions, however the computer will not boot from this drive as the master.

What started out as a simple format procedure seems to have spiralled into an area i am not familiar with. The initial boot order (before i changed anything) was 1:Floppy 2:SCSI 3:CDROM. I think the problem lies in the RAID and SCSI setup which i am not familiar with.

the specs are as follows: AMD 2400XP
Gigabyte GA-FN400Pro2
western digital 120gb HDD X2
512 DDR dual channel
Nvidia graphics

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i don't want to have to tell my friend iv ruined his computer!!

Thanks in advance.
Rich.

[Donut]

Could this be the board?http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/motherboard/Manual_Model.aspx?ClassValue=motherboard&ProductID=1756&ProductName=GA-7N400%20Pro2


If so, it looks like it supports PATA raid, I'm a little out of my league here, (ok alot) maybe the manual would help.

Sorry I couldn't help more,

[edcentric]

They were set up as raid 0, mirrors of each other.
This would involve bios setting, raid manager settings, and in some cases jumpers on the drives.
This was done for data safety, even if one drive crashed you still have all of the data.
Was the F: partion an image to use to rebuild the system?

[profdlp]

I am sure that what the other guys mentioned describes your situation to a "T".

As for the drive letter, if there is an existing drive or partition when you install Windows then it will assign it a lower letter in the alphabet. This is perfectly normal and has no impact on the performance of the system.

[airbornflght]

yeh. im thinking this 20 gig was a partition just for windows to reside on, so that the other files could be kept seperate. do you have the mobo or hd drivers cd. the mobo cd should prb have a raid utility on it. but yeh, ive never really messed with pata raid.

[Donut]

edcentric,

Is it raid 1 for mirrored drives?

[airbornflght]

yes, raid 0 is striping, your drives are mirrored, they are raid 1. people ge t confused sometime, like me i forget crap all the time.

[Tex]

Put the drives back as they were. If he does not want the data, and since your goal was to format his system I assume he doesnt... then when the raid bios comes up delete any existing config. Then create a new raid-1 NOT RAID-0 array. You want it back to being a mirrored array. He created it that way for a reason.

reboot making sure the boot order has the cdrom first and scsi second. Your going to need the floppy with the raid drivers on it. When you boot off the xp cd as soon as it starts to boot at the bottom you will BRIEFLY see a message telling you to hit f6 to load drivers. Keep whacking f6 for a couple seconds. In a minute or so the install stops and asks you to put in the driver floppy and hit enter. Do it. After that it should be able to find the raid-1 array and the rest the install is just like a normal install.

This isnt hard. Just create a new array with everything hooked up as you found it. Make a raid driver floppy and get the drivers installed by hitting f6 when prompted.

Tex