OS Copy to RAID 0 on 2 New HDD

[gu801]

I have been using a WD 250GB SATA 8MB as my Win XP boot drive for some time now and the system has been running great. I have recently purchased two new WD 250GB SATA 16MB harddrives to use in a RAID 0 setup. I have setup the RAID and copied the entire OS and MBR over to the new drives with Norton Ghost. Now when change the boot order and try to boot to the new drives it gives me a failure to boot error. Any ideas?

System Specs

MSI K8N SLI
Athlon 64 3200+
2 GB Ram

Thanks in advance

 

[Hawkeye22]

AFAIK this is not possible. You need to do a clean install of the OS onto the array and use F6 during the install to add in the raid drivers. Also, in the raid bios, make sure the array is set to "bootable".

I boot from a raid 1 array with a near identical board.

 

[jap0nes]

i guess it is possible, but you might have forgot to install your raid controller in you current single drive win xp install
in order to boot win xp from a raid array it must have support for its controller, i.e drivers must be installed.
you can try to enable your raid controller with your current winxp, boot, partition and copy to the raid array, after installing the drivers.

 

[gu801]

I have tried doing a fresh install and have pressed F6 to install the drivers which seem to be successful. Then when it comes to selecting where to install the OS it doesn't show the RAID setup, just my original C: drive.

I have also installed the RAID drivers within XP and used Ghost to copy the c drive over to the RAID setup along with the MBR. When rebooting with the nVidia stripe as the first boot device and the nVidia RAID setup with the stripe as bootable, the system will post and then give me an error stating the usual when there is no boot device present.

On a side note: When checking the disk management in XP I see that my original c drive is setup as partition and basic while the RAID drives are Simple and dynamic. Is this the correct seup?

 

[jap0nes]

if the array is not showing on windows installation with drivers installed:

1. you may have installed the wrong drivers... check if your mother board has more than one sata chip and if you installed the corresponding drivers
2. you may have setup the raid wrongly in bios
3. you may have installed a different OS driver, like x64 driver instead of 32 for example
4. you may have selected the wrong array to boot in bios

EDIT:
i did some research on your motherboard and it has 2 sata controllers:
4 ports for nvidia controller (violet)
2 ports for silicon image (blue)

which ports you connected your drives?

EDIT2:
oops, i looked at the wrong motherboard.. sorry

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have tried doing a fresh install and have pressed F6 to install the drivers which seem to be successful. Then when it comes to selecting where to install the OS it doesn't show the RAID setup, just my original C: drive.

I have also installed the RAID drivers within XP and used Ghost to copy the c drive over to the RAID setup along with the MBR. When rebooting with the nVidia stripe as the first boot device and the nVidia RAID setup with the stripe as bootable, the system will post and then give me an error stating the usual when there is no boot device present.

On a side note: When checking the disk management in XP I see that my original c drive is setup as partition and basic while the RAID drives are Simple and dynamic. Is this the correct seup?

Did you use F6 twice? You need to install both the "raid class controller" and the "sata raid" drivers.

Also, you may want to remove your old single drive before installing the OS, then replacing it afterwards. Having two system drives in windows sometimes causes confusion to the OS.

EDIT: I'm assuming you're using the nvidia sata/raid controller.

 

[Pain]

On a slight tangent. To get the ghost image to work, as the others have said, you needed to first make sure the raid drivers were installed in the current OS install. Then use ghost to move the image. Remove the old system disk. And then you might have to mark the raid array [the new system disk] as active, else it won't boot, and of course change the boot sequence in the bios.

 

[pat]

I have tried doing a fresh install and have pressed F6 to install the drivers which seem to be successful. Then when it comes to selecting where to install the OS it doesn't show the RAID setup, just my original C: drive.

I have also installed the RAID drivers within XP and used Ghost to copy the c drive over to the RAID setup along with the MBR. When rebooting with the nVidia stripe as the first boot device and the nVidia RAID setup with the stripe as bootable, the system will post and then give me an error stating the usual when there is no boot device present.

On a side note: When checking the disk management in XP I see that my original c drive is setup as partition and basic while the RAID drives are Simple and dynamic. Is this the correct seup?

Did you use F6 twice? You need to install both the "raid class controller" and the "sata raid" drivers.

Also, you may want to remove your old single drive before installing the OS, then replacing it afterwards. Having two system drives in windows sometimes causes confusion to the OS.

EDIT: I'm assuming you're using the nvidia sata/raid controller.

you don't do f6 twice, you do it once and specify twice that you want to load drivers..

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have tried doing a fresh install and have pressed F6 to install the drivers which seem to be successful. Then when it comes to selecting where to install the OS it doesn't show the RAID setup, just my original C: drive.

I have also installed the RAID drivers within XP and used Ghost to copy the c drive over to the RAID setup along with the MBR. When rebooting with the nVidia stripe as the first boot device and the nVidia RAID setup with the stripe as bootable, the system will post and then give me an error stating the usual when there is no boot device present.

On a side note: When checking the disk management in XP I see that my original c drive is setup as partition and basic while the RAID drives are Simple and dynamic. Is this the correct seup?

Did you use F6 twice? You need to install both the "raid class controller" and the "sata raid" drivers.

Also, you may want to remove your old single drive before installing the OS, then replacing it afterwards. Having two system drives in windows sometimes causes confusion to the OS.

EDIT: I'm assuming you're using the nvidia sata/raid controller.

you don't do f6 twice, you do it once and specify twice that you want to load drivers..

Aren't you a nitpicker... twice as in once for each driver.

 

[gu801]

Thanks Hawkeye!

I was loading only one of the drivers necessary when installing XP. I had to press F6 and then S twice to add each driver.

I tried copying the whole drive over to the new RAID 0 but it would get stuck in "welcome" during the xp boot. I then found out once I do a fresh install I still needed the latest SATA and RAID drivers from nVidia. The system would boot but was very sluggish until the drivers were updated.

Thanks to all for the guidance, I have a new RAID system up and running and is much faster!.

 

[Codesmith]

Here is something to remember when moving OSes to new drives.

Windows XP's registry remembers which hard drives get which letters.

So if the registry knew the new hard drive as X: and you move your OS to that drive suddenly your OS is on X: not C: breaking all sorts of references to C:

So if your OS has ever given a new drive a letter, you need to boot to the OS and remove that drive letter before moving the OS.

If you don't you may have to boot to some utility CD that will let you find and edit the registry, which isn't fun.

 

[tim737murphy]

Hey I am new to this forum. I have recently tried copying OS from WD80gigPATA HD to new WD 250gigSATA HD. All divers installed but unable to boot form that SATA drive. All changes in BIOS done and even removed all other HD's from IDE cable. Read several forums but all reccommend clean install which would be a big headache for me.SATA HD's don't have jumpers for slave and master. When booting to original WD80 ATA drive I see the new SATA HD as G drive which makes sense in the order of my drive connections. The SATA drive works fine and I loaded Call Of Duty2 on it and played flawlessly. But when trying to arrange this as a bootable drive in BIOS and taking the other drives out of the order it still won't boot. How do you make the drive C drive.