Hi. I hope someone can shed some light.

I had the above PCI raid card installed and working in an old HP xw8000 workstation to create a Raid 1 set. I had a huge problem with my Win XP Pro install and took apart the Raid, kept one HDD for the data, reformatted and clean reinstalled everything on the other. So far so good. Now I want to recreate a Raid 1 set with the two disks, and that is where the trouble begins.

The problem is that if I recreate the mirrored Raid with the two drives, I can't boot. After the Raid card bios comes up (where normally Windows starts to boot up with the splash screen), the computer spontaneously reboots. I did manage to copy from the source to the target drive using just the card, and the computer will boot from either drive, but not both as a Raid 1. The card bios sees both drives, reports both as current, says the set is OK, and after that reboots.

I've tried and tried again reinstalling the driver. Device Manager reports everything is hunky-dory, but it certainly seems to be a driver problem.

There are only two things that I can see that have changed. First, I updated to SP3 before trying to set up the Raid. The last installation was also updated to SP3, but the card was originally configured with SP2. I can't see how this would make a difference, however.

Windows Update found me a newer driver and I installed that as well before trying to recreate the Raid. I now have a Sataraid Controller icon in Control Panel which I never had before....hmmmm...

Another thing that I don't like is the reinstall. If I remove the driver and reboot, Windows automatically reinstalls the driver without asking me. I am then relegated to "updating" the driver on the tab in Device Manager. What do you think, should I go into System32 and trash the present driver and try again to uninstall/reinstall?

BTW I have two identical PCI cards, and swapped them just in case it was a hardware fault. Same same with both.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas they would be most welcome, as I can't think of what else to do.

TIA,

Toby