Need help partitioning and w/ external hd back up on raid 0 system

[grandmastermark]

Firstly, THANKS for all you do! I would have never gotten this far with out your awesome posts.

I just set up a raid 0 system with 2 xWD Caviar Black 640 gb hd's. Spec's as follows:

Vista premium 64
AMD Phenom Quad Core 9550 2.2 GHz
Asus m3a78-emh hdmi mATX motherboard
8gb DDR2 800Mhz PC6400 - 2GB x 4
Sata 20x DVD
Fantom 1TB eSata external HD through jmicron esata - raid adaptor

PROBLEM 1

System works perfectly unless Fantom (Gdrive is hooked up and turned on. When Fantom drive is on the boot hangs when it is looking for the boot drive. Seems like it is wanting to find boot info on that drive. If I start the system first and then attach the Fantom drive via USB (plug and play) everything works fine.

Did I miss something in the bios? and is it in the mobo bios or the raid bios? Maybe a conflict between the jmicron bios and mobo bios? I realy need to get this working through the esata board.

PROBLEM 2

ALSO, I tried to partition the raid array down to c: = 80 gbs with remainder going to secondary volume (F Windows would not let me shrink the c: drive down to less than 1 gig? How can I get it down to 80 or 100 gigs?

Yes, I am a nooB and thanks in advance!

 

[440bx]

I believe your guess that the machine is trying to boot from the Fantom drive is correct. In the BIOS of your motherboard, under "Boot/Boot Device Priority" see if it gives you the option of specifying _which_ hard drive to boot from. If it doesn't, you may need to connect the drive after the machine has booted. Your eSata adapter should (hopefully) support AHCI which would allow you to hotplug your Fantom using the eSata interface.

As far as problem #2, your numbers don't make any sense.

Windows won't let you shrink the C: drive down to less than 1GB simply because Windows needs more than that just for itself.

80GB or 100GB should be just fine. My Windows partitions are less than half those sizes and I've never encountered a problem.

Try restating problem #2.

HTH.

 

[grandmastermark]

Try restating problem #2.

HTH.

440bx,

Thank you for the tips. I will try at my earliest convenience.

I did mis-state problem 2. Windiws disk manager won't allow me to shrink c: to less than 1 terrabyte. Currently, I am set up with a raid 0 array that is partitioned as such:

c: = 1.1 TB
f: = 149 GB

Windows doesn't seem to want to let me shrink c: down to 80 GBs or 100 GBs

Thanks again!

 

[440bx]

440bx,

Thank you for the tips. I will try at my earliest convenience.

I did mis-state problem 2. Windiws disk manager won't allow me to shrink c: to less than 1 terrabyte. Currently, I am set up with a raid 0 array that is partitioned as such:

c: = 1.1 TB
f: = 149 GB

Windows doesn't seem to want to let me shrink c: down to 80 GBs or 100 GBs

Thanks again!

I've used this software successfully, maybe it will solve the problem you are facing. It's free.

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

HTH.

 

[grandmastermark]

440bx, Thank you for the bios tip. I found the boot priority in the bios and made the changes. Works perfectly.

The free partition tool won't work on 64 bit systems so I am looking for one that will. I may have to fork over the $30+ to buy the 64 bit one.

 

[440bx]

You're welcome.

There are quite a number of "specialized" utilities that don't work on 64bit Windows installations. That's another reason, I setup dual boot systems, one of the installations being a 32bit Windows XP, just for occasions like that.

Glad the tips worked for you.