0x7E for trying to install RAID drivers on Dell Precision 490

[byz4ntinian]

Have a Dell Precision 490 with 2 SATA drives in RAID1. A user came along and either deleted or corrupted the hal.dll file, making the machine unbootable. Machines posts and comes up with "hal.dll file is missing" and never goes anywhere.

So I pop in the Windows XP CD and reboot and it doesn't detect any drives/OS installations. I reboot again to see the RAID configuration status prompt and it says the RAID status is "Verify" but both disks are "Good" and "Bootable" according to the boot screen.

So I figured the RAID driver might be bad, I downloaded atleast a dozen various RAID drivers from the DELL site. The precision 490's use the x5000 chipset which doesn't use ICH7/8 or any of that it uses ESB. So after several tries with ESB and even non-ESB RAID drivers, the machine now BSOD's when I go to do a system repair with the Windows disc.

So now, I can't boot because the .dll is missing, I can't repair because the RAID driver BSOD's the Windows Repair screen, and the BIOS says everything is just peachy. 2 work days later i'm still stuck.

 

[popatim]

In my raid, if it says verify it means it has lost drive syncing and needs to verify data integrity. In my case I lost all data and had to restore from backups. TG I'm anal about my backups. These raids that need drivers are the worst.... Good luck

 

[byz4ntinian]

The worst thing is the RAID utility only gives a few options, none of which even tell you what driver it's supposed to use, or is currently using. It doesn't even give me the option to verify data integrity, unless it's some hidden hotkey that I don't know about.

And I find it odd that even though the disks are in RAID1 the utility states that if I break the RAID the data will be lost from the drives. I'd understand if it was something that spanned data, but do RAID1's really lose their data?

 

[byz4ntinian]

Removing one of the disks allowed the "good" disk to boot. Thankfully, I picked the correct disk first so that the good disk then corrected the error on the bad one when I re-connected. Reinserting the disk allowed for it to "verify" data integrity. Computer now boots fine.

 

[byz4ntinian]

Best answer selected by byz4ntinian.