Nvidia Raid Vista install issues!

Are you trying to do a clean install with an "upgrade" disk?

I presume you found the answer to this given that it's been a few weeks since your post, but I recently ran into the same error message on a new install. The solution was to install vista64 in "debugging" mode. To do that, hit F8 key while the windows installer is loading (i.e., hit the F8 key when silver bar is almost completed). Select "debugging" mode at the black DOS screen. This was the only way around the RAID issue I've found.

I'm not sure if this fully relates but a friend of mine had issues installing Vista from a SATA optical drive onto a RAID. We have the ASUS M2N 32 Delux board which has an NVIDIA RAID controller. Reading the manual we discovered that the SATA controller does not support optical drives and so we would either have to provide drivers or install from IDE (which is what we did).

I had a problem with my XP/Vista dual boot too. Mine was re. a parition on a SATA drive. But I don't think that's all that relevant. What's actually important is that what eventually worked for me was a solution that was VERY hard to find on the net, and was something that Microsoft could easily have resolved by mentioning it on the same page as their ridiculously vague 'criteria' message. That is, as I eventually (after many hours over the course of a few days) learnt, that I had to set my 2nd partition as an 'active' partition before Vista would install. i did this using Acronis Disk Director, where after XP was installed, I flicked the 'active' partition over to the empty partition where Vista was to be installed. There can only be one active partition on a hard drive, and I felt it a bit of a risk to flick it over as I didn;t know for sure it would work and I might end up with a laptop that wouldn't boot up at all. But it worked PERFECTLY after that. Whether this is the solution for you, I can't tell. But I will say that only ONE posting out of maybe a total of a hundred or so that I must have read on the internet ever mentioned this 'Active' requirement to me. And s it did work for me, i'm doing my bit back to the community and letting others know that this is at least one other potential solution. Good luck and I hope anyone who reads this gets there in the end.

I had the same problem. I had a RAID 0 array (two 150GB velociraptors) and a 500GB storage drive. Vista would not recognize the RAID array as an installable drive unless I disconnected the storage drive. It's really weird and frustrating because I just kept checking and rechecking all the RAID settings and BIOS settings to make sure the RAID array was set to bootable and the primary drive. Also, just to pass along info, when you are at the disk configuration screen during the Vista installation, you can press <shift>F10 to access a command promt, where you can run DISKPART if you want to do any advanced configurations that aren't available from the basic screen.

So anyway, if you're having problems installing Vista on a RAID array and you have a drive that's not part of the array connected, try disconnecting it and try again. Worked for me when nothing else would :-)

Thanks a LOT!

I had an external drive connected through USB, and when I disconnedted it and tried the installation again, everything worked!

- Jesper

Hi I am having problems installing Vista 32 Home edition. After selecting the language the systems stops and asks for device driver for the DVD. This is a clean install with an upgrade disk. Any suggestions or does anyone have a driver that I can just install and continue with my installation.

Thank you all,
momchil