Newb and RAID0

[UAL3312]

well ehem saturday to be exact, i built a system featuring the new Core2 Duo and 680/8800 series from Nvidia and to top it off i purchased 2 WD Raptor's after trying and trying i finally gave up and installed my OS on one hard drive the other one is currently unformated i somewhat figured out how to setup the RAID 0 Config now and turn on the raid drivers and whatnot but only one drive is recognized (2 show up in BIOS only one shows up in the RAID list) so how would i go about Reformating and getting them both into the RAID 0, a Complete list of steps would be VERY highly appreciated
Thanks

Ryan

 

[candeethug]

This is a tough one since I don't know what MOBO you are using, your BIOS, or the RAID controller. I assume the RAID list you are talking about is the RAID setup menu and not a list in your BIOS. The last time I did this here is what I did...

first I made a driver floppy disk with the SATA RAID drivers on it using my other computer.
next I hooked up both drives into SATA ports 1 and 2 of my MOBO (since I used onboard rather than an add-on controller card)
I then went into my BIOS and made sure it saw both drives, then I activated SATA RAID in the BIOS. (I think it was automatically set up for SATA ports 1 & 2) next I set the boot priority to <1. CD <2. harddrive (with the HD setting for scsi raid)
then I saved changes and exited BIOS.
After that I went into the RAID menu and my system saw both the drives so I set up a bootable raid 0 and saved the settings
then I let my system run with the windows CD in the drive and it started going through the set-up. almost right after the blue screen comes up it says <press F2 to install 3rd party scsi raid drivers> which I did. after a while a window pops up and tells you to insert the disk (floppy) and it will have you load the drivers manually from a list that pops up in the window. My disk had 2 different drivers on it and both needed to be installed. after that I just let the whole install process run and everything went fine.

I was using an ASUS A8N-E MOBO and 2 74gig raptor drives. The raid drivers I used were on my MOBO CD and my OS was XP pro.

I recently tried it again with XP64 (I downloaded the 64 bit raid drivers and made the disk) but it would always have problems loading the raid drivers and I couldn't get it to work.

anyway I hope this helps some even though I really have no clue why your RAID menu isn't seeing both drives...

CT

 

[UAL3312]

well put, and yes, im talking about the RAID setup menu im using an eVGA 680i motherboard with RAID0 if im able to get it to recognize both drives does it mattter one HD already has XP pro installed on it? or will both just be wiped and reformated into NTFS? thanks for the reply

Ryan

 

[yakyb]

i think the best bet would be to copy your raid drivers on to a disk, reformat both drives (after backing up ofc). then run the mobo configuration utlity. making sure that both drives are connected to the same sata controller most modern mobos contain 2 sata controllers yopur manual will tell you which ones you require to use. and build your array, then reinstall windows and press F6 (i think) when prompted for 3rd party raid drivers (it will ask at the bottom of the screen). then i think you will be okay

 

[NeonDeon]

i think the best bet would be to copy your raid drivers on to a disk, reformat both drives (after backing up ofc). then run the mobo configuration utlity. making sure that both drives are connected to the same sata controller most modern mobos contain 2 sata controllers yopur manual will tell you which ones you require to use. and build your array, then reinstall windows and press F6 (i think) when prompted for 3rd party raid drivers (it will ask at the bottom of the screen). then i think you will be okay

Dito! Only I waould say since most people don't have a floppy anymore, burn the raid drivers to a CD.

 

[UAL3312]

Well i bought a Floppy for the Extra good purpose, but windows will stop supporting them in Vista so somewhat useless ill give it a try though, thanks