RAID Mirror not fault tolerant, by Worried of Wales

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain (More info?)

Hi group,

I've got a RAID 1 Mirror comprising 2 SATA drives, each on it's own
physical connector that is recognised as healthy by the nVidia nForce 2 RAID
BIOS on boot. All BIOS settings are confirmed as correct. Drives are
formatted properly and all system drivers are up to date.

Installed WIN XP Pro SP2 slipstreamed properly - pressed F6 to install
required RAID drivers from floppy & continued on with the install. Once I
reached the point where the GUI appears after the reboot the expected
progress starts to deviate from what is written in the motherboard manual....

There should be a request to install the RAID driver, once for each drive,
during this part of the install but it never appeared. It was described as
"might be prompted for" in the manual so I wasn't too bothered by its
non-appearance and the driver floppy did spin up at one point so I assumed it
had installed each drive automatically.

Continued the install... everything boots up from the SATA RAID mirror
normally..

Surprisingly, both RAID drives are visible in the systray as removable
drives under the SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE icon. On to the next step...

Went into Disk Management expecting the Initialize & Convert Disk Wizard to
automatically appear but no sign of it ever. The RAID drives are visible as
ONE drive (as you would expect) within Disk Management but are described as
NOT fault tolerant.

I've also tried to convert the mirror to a dynamic disc but this failed
every time. Installed NVRAIDMAN.exe (nForce RAID viewing utility) and this
reports the mirror as functional & healthy from within the Windows GUI
environment.

Can't find any reference to the Initialize & Convert Disk Wizard in
Microsoft Help & Support, except in a Windows Server 2003 KB article, which I
can't find again.... and I'm not keen on messing with anyway.

I've repeated the whole process several times to ensure I haven't missed
anything, but the end result is always the same.

So I now have a mirror array that is not fault tolerant in Windows Disk
Management. This isn't what I expected - the whole purpose of a RAID Mirror
is to provide fault tolerance.

My questions are:

1. Is it really not fault tolerant or is this some quirk of Windows?
2. How can I get the Initialize & Convert Disk Wizard to do it's job?
3. Do I have to live with the SATA drives being seen as removable drives?
4. What do I believe - the nVidia RAID BIOS & RAID Viewing tool or Windows
Disk Management?

All help gratefully received!

__________________
CHeers, Goggz

MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Platinum
Athlon XP 3000+ (not o/c'ed) FSB 333mHz
Thermaltake Silent Boost @ 34C idle
1Gig Crucial RAM PC3200 @400DDR CL3
Sapphire 9800 Atlantis Pro 128Mb
Pagefile on ATA100 Hitachi Deskstar 80G IDE1 Slave
Booting on 2x Hitachi Deskstar 120G SATA (Mirror RAID = 115Gb)
Cisco Aironet Wireless LAN PCI Card
Soundblaster Audigy 2
PCI USB card (2 ports)
MSI USB adapter (2 ports)
Philips DVD-RW
Sony CD-RW
LS120 IDE1 Master
Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 93sb Monitor
Jeantech 480W PSU
Acousticase & Akasa fan controller (reasonably quiet)