Activating RAID on my Giga DQ6 Mobo won't let WinXP boot

[suzukii]

Why Weezy, Why???!!!

Here we go again guys & gals...
No info at their website found on this so I thought I'd ask here since I get so many educated, intelligent & diverse solutions to the same problems I've posted previously.

W-A-R-N-I-N-G!!! Safety First!!!, Backup First & look both ways B4 cross-firing!
If you plan on trying this yourself please remember that creating a RAID with this mobo will erase any of your existing data on the drives being used for this process in creating a new RAID volume... I learned this the hard way, but had prepared for it.

Activating the RAID features on my Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 Mobo won't let WinXP SP2 boot. Windows begins to boot & about 1 minute into the booting process, BAAAM!!! R-E-B-O-O-T!!!!

I want to create a RAID1 (dual drive mirroring), using two 750GB SATA2 Seagates for my data only.
My OS is already setup & on a separate physical 250GB hd disk.
Knowing that I would eventually be using the RAID features of this great mobo I added the Gigabyte SATA2 RAID drivers version 1.14.0.0 & the Intel ICH8R version 6.1.0.1002 drivers during the OS setup. I downloaded the latest drivers, as of this writing, which can be found at the Gigabyte DQ6 Drivers Site. The drivers state they must be preinstalled during the OS setup.
During the initial install of this Windows XP SP2 Pro setup I did press the "F6" option to tell the Windows setup to copy the Gigabyte RAID & ICH8R drivers from the floppy I had copied them onto, which copied over smoothly.

So what went wrong????

RAID1 H-E-L-P?

 

[Mondoman]

...Activating the RAID features on my Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 Mobo ...

So what (exactly!) did you do? Change settings in the MB BIOS? Install drives? Change settings in the RAID BIOS? Please list exactly what you did as close to step by step as possible.

 

[suzukii]

Well, there's not much to tell. I didn't get very far after enabling the RAID features in the BIOS & creating the RAID Level-1 volumes in the RAID configuration screen.

In the Gigabyte BIOS settings I went into:
(1) Integrated Peripherals,
(2) Set SATA RAID/AHCI Mode: [Enabled]
(3) Set SATA Port 0-3 Native Mode: [Disabled]
(4) Set Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode: [RAID/IDE]

I alternated from [Disabled] to [Enabled] between steps 2 & 3 to see if Windows XP would successfully boot up.

Simply creating the volumes shouldn't hinder Windows from booting or making it get stuck in a reboot cycle unless there is an incompatibility issue, driver issue or something I can't think of right now. Ehhh?
I sent this info to Gigabyte, but so far they didn't Byte yet.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions you may have.

 

[Mondoman]

Perhaps Windows just ignored the Raid driver in your initial install because it didn't see any Raid controller at that time (since it was disabled in the BIOS then). I'm not sure if there's an easy way to install it again or whether you would have to do a repair install of Windows.

 

[suzukii]

Perhaps Windows just ignored the Raid driver in your initial install because it didn't see any Raid controller at that time (since it was disabled in the BIOS then). I'm not sure if there's an easy way to install it again or whether you would have to do a repair install of Windows.

Maybe that's the reason. I just heard from Gigabyte & they're telling me that I need to reinstall Windows XP & try installing the RAID drivers again during the installation.

T-H-I-S---G-I-G-A-B-Y-T-E-S!!!!

 

[Mondoman]

Unfortunately, it shows the complexity and importance of BIOS settings on modern MBs.