SATA drivers preventing boot

Nolf-JobNolf-Job Inside each and every one of you!
edited September 2005 in Hardware
Specs: Abit NF7-s v2.0, Barton 2500, 1 gig ram, bios rev. 27

Before I had an 80gb WD that had 3 partitions. About a year ago I setup 2 160gb WD in SATA raid 1. (I'm thinking I left the original drive hooked up because the new drive(s) have partions labeled G,H,I.) I installed XP Pro and everything has been working fine with both drives installed, during boot it would always give me the option to select which XP setup I wanted to load. I decided to reformat the original drive (which contained the C: partition) so that I could make it storage.

After I did that, the SATA array showed up during boot, but would not load. Got 'Disk Boot Failure'. I reformatted the original and installed XP, loaded the SATA drivers from Abit disk and the drives show up in Windows Explorer, but I cannot get Windows to boot to the raid array, only to the secondary XP setup. The drives show up under the windows xp configuration if I wanted to delete them and install windows new. Not sure what to do from here.

Comments

  • Nolf-JobNolf-Job Inside each and every one of you!
    edited August 2005
    still in need of help
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited August 2005
    I guess I'll try and help but although do I know what has happened, I'm not sure if what I'm going to tell you to do will help. It should, but I'm just not sure.

    Anyway, when you installed XP on the raid and left the "c" dirve attached, XP installed a couple of files on the first drive it saw, which was the "c" drive. It won't boot without those files, period. When you took the original "c" drive out of the system, you took those files with it so no boot from the raid array. You need to put those required files onto the raid drives or it'll never boot from the array.

    My suggestion for this is to do a repair install from the XP install cd. Remove the old "c" drive. From a cold start, go into the bios and set one of your cdroms as the ONLY boot device, put the XP cd in the aforementioned cdrom drive and exit the bios and reboot. Press f6 when told as windows starts to load Raid driver files, having your raid driver floppy handy as you would on a fresh install. Install floppy with raid drivers when prompted and continue the install. It'll ask you if you want to go to recovery console, but don't do it, just continue with the install. If you installed the raid drivers when prompted, it will then find the old install on the raid drves and offer to repair it or do a fresh install. Choose to repair the existing install and it should put the required files in their place on the raid drives. The repair could take as long as a half hour, depending on your hardware.

    After it's done, you'll have to go into the bios again and put your raid as the boot device and you should be good to go.

    Good Luck,

    Flint
  • Nolf-JobNolf-Job Inside each and every one of you!
    edited August 2005
    Thanks for the help flint, that's what I was thinking. I tried it before and double checked again after your post, but I'm not given the option to repair my install. It shows my 3 partitions (boot, programs, storage) and will allow me to reformat any of them and install from there, but I'm hoping not to have to do that. I've read a few things about other options like copying the boot.ini file over and things like that through the recovery console, but I'm just not sure exactly what files may be missing. Any other suggestions?
  • Nolf-JobNolf-Job Inside each and every one of you!
    edited August 2005
    Problem fixed, just wanted to provide an update in case anyone else runs into this.

    After checking out this site, http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm , I copied the ntldr files to my sata setup. Interesting thing though, is that in Windows the drive partitions are listed as G, H, and I, but in the recovery console, I could only copy the files to the C: even though my original drive was unhooked. On boot now it says "Invalid boot.ini" "Booting from C:\Windows" . Then it boots up fine. I figure I can recopy the boot.ini, but that may require a repair install so I'm just going to leave it for now.
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited August 2005
    If you can now boot from the array, the installer will now see the old install and you can repair it. When I made my initial reply, I understood you to say that the install on the array was visible, it just wouldn't boot from it. Anyway, I'm glad you've made progress.

    Flint
  • gustepgustep
    edited September 2005
    Hi everyone,

    I've just solved a boot problem on my NF7-S 2.0 while trying to install W2K on a SATA drive. First off, to eliminate other reasons, I had only the SATA drive (SATA channel 0) and the CD-ROM (Secondary IDE Master) hooked up.

    W2K install from CD went well, hit F6 to install SATA driver etc., copied files to SATA HDD. Then, the HDD wouldn't be recognized during the next boot, despite the fact that I had set "First boot device: SATA" and enabled the SATA contoller etc.

    The trick was to not only enable the SATA controller, but also to enable the BOOT SATA RAID ROM option in the bios. My incorrect assumption was that you only activate the SATA RAID ROM option if you want to do maintenance on your RAID array, and since I only had a single HDD, I wasn't needing it. However, enabling the SATA RAID ROM option is what makes the SATA drives available for booting, too! You don't need to enter the RAID config (it says to hit Ctrl-S if you want it). Just enable SATA RAID ROM, and now windows boots just fine from the SATA HDD. No driver updates or bios updates were necessary.
    .

    Sebastian O.
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