Installing OS Onto Onboard RAID0

peteb · Feb 20, 2002

Anyone ever manage to get Win2K or XP installed onto a promise onboard raid0 array on an a7v133 or similar?

I've tried just about every trick and it won't do it.

Array is good, read/writeable under DOS. I press F6 and give the installtion the drivers for the controller, but it always reports there is no disk to install OS to.

Arrgghhhh!!! If anyone has succeded - please let me in on the secret I've missed.

I've gone in and tried raw disk, partitioned disk, formatted disk and it always fails to see it.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

lhgpoobaa · Feb 20, 2002

whats your boot sequence?
tried changing it around so it looks for the cd/floppy first (whichever u want)

Overclocked athlon 1200C @ 8.5 x 166FSB + PC2700 = GOOD!

peteb · Feb 20, 2002

Why? I can boot the install off CD fine, just that the install cannot see the raid array to install the os onto, despite pressing F6 and loading the raid driver....

Current boot sequence is SCSI/CD/Floppy. You can manually select which device to boot from by pressing ESC during the boot as well.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

lhgpoobaa · Feb 20, 2002

i cant remember exactly what the a7v133 had...
have u checked the raid/ide/none jumper? i assume so.

apart from that i suggest you go over to viahardware and post on their forums for more specific help

Overclocked athlon 1200C @ 8.5 x 166FSB + PC2700 = GOOD!

peteb · Feb 20, 2002

The array is fine, jumpered up correctly. It has been functioning as a non-boot partition on my system for many months. It will load and is usable from DOS very happily.

I think it is some issue with 2K that I have missed.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

jlanka · Feb 20, 2002

what file system is on the array?

Also, I had trouble installing from booted CD - have you tried copying the i386 directory to the array partition (I'm assuming it's FAT32) and booting from a floppy and doing the install from the array? Worth a shot.

It's always the one thing you never suspected.

FatBurger · Feb 20, 2002

I don't think that would work, since you normally have to format when installing Windows.

Quarter Pounder Inside

jlanka · Feb 20, 2002

It absolutely would work - I've done it hundreds of times. In fact I assert that it's the fastest/easiest way to install NT. If you have enough disk space you can leave the i386 directory there, this way if you ever need any drivers in the future you've got it. NT (2K XP whatever) asks you if you want to leave the file system intact, or convert it to NTFS. Either way there's no formatting involved. Give it a try, you've got nothing to lose.

It's always the one thing you never suspected.

FatBurger · Feb 21, 2002

I would try it, but I'm waiting for my motherboard to come in :tongue:

Quarter Pounder Inside

camieabz · Feb 21, 2002

You got the 3rd party drivers on a floppy disk?

I found I needed that. The CD on its own wouldn't work for me.

The Cisco Kid

peteb · Feb 21, 2002

Okay - solved the problem.

The issue was that the drivers (on floppy) that I had downloaded were apparently incorrect - and although were being recognised as the controller under the install, were in fact incorrect.

I loaded the OS onto a single IDE drive, then tried manually installing the raid controller with the OS running - where it informed me that the drivers were not correct. Useful.

So - I hunted around and by some miracle managed to find the CD that shipped with the mobo, which I was able to extract 2K drivers from and install. Unfortunately I still cannot find viable XP drivers.

The drivers I have are old, so the performance of the array sucks currently, barely tops 40MBs, but it is 305GB!!!

I get better performance off a single WD 1000 8Mb drive - those things rock.

So, I'm getting there.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

Ncogneto · Feb 21, 2002

Raid 0? If so, do you really want to install your OS to it? You can do a software RAID in 2k or XP but you cannot boot to it.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

Ncogneto · Feb 21, 2002

<A HREF="http://www.athlonxp.com/reviews_raid.html" target="_new">http://www.athlonxp.com/reviews_raid.html</A>

Interesting article however I am not sure I agree on all counts.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

jlanka · Feb 21, 2002

Unfortunately I still cannot find viable XP drivers.

The 2K drivers didn't work under XP?

It's always the one thing you never suspected.

peteb · Feb 21, 2002

Absolutely - I now have a Nice 16GB system partition to fit every application I can think of onto, and a nice 280GB partition to install data to.

Why not RAID0 the system partition? I want my apps and OS to load faster too.....

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

peteb · Feb 21, 2002

Nope - XP complained about a bad filter not enabling all functionality of the controller. I checked the FAQ at Promise and they said to ingnore it, it would work anyway, but when I over-rode the error at driver loading time in XP, the driver installation failed and XP said there was no appropriate driver.

I think I found an XP driver now so I may give it a go - Asus have their download pages back up again (finally) so fingers crossed I can bring this thing up on XP, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

peteb · Feb 21, 2002

Yeah - I saw this a while back.

Well, software raid has it's uses.

For me, I don't want that much data striped through my OS.

The new system I'm building has > 0.5TB of storage in two arrays - that I want a controller card to do. So, I've got 5 Cheetah 10K drives hanging off an Adaptec 2110S in Raid5 and 4 100GB WD 8Mb drives hanging of a Promise Fasttrak100TX2 in Raid0.

-* !! S O L D !! *-
To the gentleman in the pink Tutu

Ncogneto · Feb 21, 2002

I have been playing around with it a bit ( software RAID ). My cpu utilization is only at 6-8% on a 4 drive stripe using 4 seagate cheatah 10 k drives. What model drives (just curious) are you using and what type of transfer rates are you getting (a)per drive and (b) for the combined stripe total? Real curious here as it would be a nice comparison for me. Seems there are some big differences between drive families in the SEAGATE 10k drives. My Setup consist of a qlogic HBA and FC-AL drives btw.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

Installing OS Onto Onboard RAID0

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