RAID Error? Please help....

mellowtoadmellowtoad
edited October 2007 in Hardware
Hi folks. I recently bought a PNY PCI Express Sata II Raid Controller and installed it in my HP m8000n Media Center PC, which has a M2N68-LA (Narra) motherboard. I'm running Vista Home Premium and am attempting to setup my two 500GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration (I've got a 1TB Click to Back Up external drive to back all this data up and also do backups through Mozy). I'm having a small problem.

I installed the card and attached the drives to the card. I set the jumpers on the card to internal drives only. I then proceeded to boot Vista, installed on the first NFTS formatted drive, which after a quick driver installation read the both drives no problem.

So, with everything backed up, I shut down the computer and pressed F4 to load up my BIOS for the RAID card at the BIOS screen. At this screen I'm only shown one 465GB drive. I enter the setup page and I'm given these different options such as low level format, set up RAID, Delete RAID Arrays, rebuild Array and Concatenation. I chose Set Up RAID 0 (striped) and I get an error message telling me "not enough free single discs to create raid setup".

Thinking this has to do with formatting, I loaded up Vista and deleted the partition info off of my 2nd drive--it was NFTS also. Now it has no formatting on it. So basically, I've got two hard drives now, that are being read by and usable under Windows, one with Windows, formatted with NTFS, and the other one with nothing. But my RAID Bios is telling me that its only reading one drive. I searched by motherboard BIOS and found that it's also only reading one drive, although I see that the RAID controller is listed under boot devices. I changed it to boot first, then loaded up my RAID Bios once more, only to have it still tell me that there are not enough single discs to create a RAID array.

This is driving me nuts. Do any of you have any idea as to how I might do this or what I need to do?

Thanks,

Josh

Comments

  • sacredsacred
    edited October 2007
    im kinda confused lol how many hard drives do you have in total 2 ?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    You have to create the stripe before installing anything.
  • mellowtoadmellowtoad
    edited October 2007
    Thanks. I have two drives installed. So, I need to clear both drives completely before it will work, correct?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    That's correct. The striping process is an overlay that goes on both disks, to merge them together (In effect). If data is there when the action is undertaken, cheaper controllers simply destroy the data and do it. Seems you have a nice controller that is obtusely warning you that you have unblanked drives.
  • mellowtoadmellowtoad
    edited October 2007
    Ok. I figured out what was going on. I, being the biggest idiot in the world, and working in such a small wire-heavy cramped computer space, acidently hooked up my DVD drive to the RAID card instead of my second hard drive. It has the same kind of connector and I guess I followed it incorrectly.

    That problem is solved. This is a problem of grevious user error, and I am man enough to admit it, as I'm sure there is probably somebody out there who has had too much to drink and has at some point done the same thing. Thanks for the responses and sorry for wasting your time.

    However, I'm now facing a new kind of problem. My HP Rescue and Recover discs are not reconizing this new array. As soon as I open them I get a RunTime Error saying that the application unexpectly quit. I know the discs work because I just reinstalled Vista before I setup this RAID thing. Any ideas where to go here? I don't get any kind of promt to install drivers and I don't have a Vista install CD by itself. Crap.
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