two 300gb maxtor satas: RAID 0. need help pls

richyrichy
edited August 2006 in Hardware
I'm hoping for some help here, I read through the posts but couldn't find an answer to my problem so here goes...

I have a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300Gb SATA HDD in my rig and I just got another one today, I installed it fine and it has been recognised by windows (disk management). The problem is trying to get RAID 0 set up properly, its doing my nut now big time. I have a Gigabyte K8N-SLi mobo.

The jist is this... i go to "intergrated peripherals" in bios and enable "IDE/RAID Function" which is okay, then reboot and wait for "RAID Setup Utility" which I go into and setup a new striped array with my two drives. The manual says to set the array to "boot" which i've done. Now here comes the problem...

After the POST the RAID 0 array is recognised and marked as "healthy" after a few seconds I get the following messages:

[PHP]
Verifying DMI Pool Data.....
Boot from CD/DVD:

NVIDIA Boot Agent 201.0462
Copyright 2001-2004 NVIDIA Corporation
Copyright "blah blah" Intel Corporation[/PHP]

now after around 1 minute of waiting here i get the following...

[PHP]PXE-E61, media test cable, check cable
PXE-MOF, Exit Boot Agent
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER[/PHP]

And thats it.. I'm completely stumped as to where to go from here and would appreciate anyone of you ppl throwing me a bone here, even if its just a suggestion. I would be grateful for ANY advice. TIA.

richy

Comments

  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited August 2006
    You need to format and install windows :p . (Any data you had on the drives before is now gone)
  • richyrichy
    edited August 2006
    GrayFox wrote:
    You need to format and install windows :p . (Any data you had on the drives before is now gone)
    i would disagree with that, during the RAID Setup Utility when confirming the selected drives a prompt is given with the option for clear the slected drives, there is an option to select no.

    If this is mandatory as you say, why would there be a choice here, are you sure about this?
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited August 2006
    Pop the old drive that had the data in it into another machine and run testdisk. You should beable to recover anything thats lost then put it back in that machine raid it then reinstall windows and all your apps :).

    edit: Assuming you have data on there you want to save
  • richyrichy
    edited August 2006
    GrayFox wrote:
    Pop the old drive that had the data in it into another machine and run testdisk. You should beable to recover anything thats lost then put it back in that machine raid it then reinstall windows and all your apps :).

    edit: Assuming you have data on there you want to save

    Are you sure the solution isn't a little more simple than this? I mean it seems as if its just a matter of getting the copy of windows that i have to boot properly from my original when the 2 hdds are in RAID 0...

    Why can I not just use the array of two hdds and boot the copy of windows that I already have on my original hdd? Are you sure this is impossible?

    Just so I've got this straight, if in the future I add a third hdd to the array, all of the data on the previous two hdds in the array will become unusable as a reinstall of windows will be needed? That seems very impractical.

    I mean no disrespect in questioning your advice, its just I'm very new to the whole RAID thing..

    PS. My original drive is still 100% fine, I'm using it right now.
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited August 2006
    Raid works much diffrently then a single harddrive and its not just simply spaning them. Normaly building an aray causes full data loss but your controler didnt wipe it.

    And if you want any proformence increase you need to format as your data is not structuered in the correct way.

    Heres a link to the wikipedia artical for Raid
  • richyrichy
    edited August 2006
    okay, it looks as though i'm going to have to reformat and start from scratch, which means installing pesky sata drivers during install of windows again...

    having trouble remembering which drivers i used for the raid, think it was sil3114... oh well... thanks anyway mate.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    Do you have a third drive that can serve as a data backup to the RAID array? I would highly recommend it. If you run RAID 0 it is only a matter of time until the array is broken and you loose all your data. There are MANY of us here at Short-Media who previously ran RAID 0 arrays but now wouldn't touch it even if paid to do so. It's a high risk proposition with very little reward. The challenge is fun, but that's about all you'll get out of it.
Sign In or Register to comment.