MalakithSkadi

ok this morning I had a mega crash relating to nv4 display drivers on an infinate loop, which I couldnt get round because it wouldnt display for me to see to load into safe mode.

Anyway my PC needed a reformat.

So I put the Norton Ghost disc in that I did when I first had the system how I wanted it, went to run it... cant detect a drive to install the image to.

Now I remember having this issue last time I reformatted due to the 2 Sata drives being in RAID0 Array. At that time I had to put the drivers onto floppy discs and when asked in the Windows install sequence put them in. So I have done that again, formatted and installed windows to the hard drive quite happily.

The PC then reboots ready to load up windows, and im back to square one. No hard drive to boot from. Iv ran the windows install again to confirm it did install, which is has (indicated by the free space compared to partition size).

Which leads me to believe its the raid/sata drivers.

On boot up I get up the ASUS splash screen with
Hit Tab to display BIOS POST message or Del to enter setup.
This has never come up at any time in the past.
If I hit tab I get the normal black loadup screen with Hit del for Setup or F8 for boot menu. The boot menu contains the floppy drive and CD drive, nothing else.

Entering the BIOS I have the primary IDE as the CD drive, all the others are not detected.

Heres the PC Spec, hope someone can help!

Intel Core 2 DUO E6700 2.67GHz Dual Core CPU
EVGA nForce 680 (Socket LGA775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Corsair 2GB DDR2 PC2-8500 Dominator TwinX (2x1GB) Dual Channel Kit
2 x 150GB Western Digital RaptorX 16MB Cache SATA Hard Drive (RAID 0 Configured)
NVIDIA 8800 GTX 768MB GDDR3 VIVO HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
NEC 7173 18x DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)
Floppy Drive
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Sound Card
Enermax Galaxy 850W Next Generation Power Supply
Windows XP Professional

MalakithSkadi

Ok more info I just remembered.

Normally it would switch to a second page with the Ctrl + S for configuring the Raid. This hasnt happened at all this time it just jumps to the couldnt not find a bootable media, please insert and press any key to continue message.

Discs I have are

XP Pro disc
Motherboard disc although all this gives me is the ability to install raid drivers to a floppy disc which I have from last time anyway
Gfx and Sound card driver CDs (not bootable discs)
Norton Ghost image of how I want my PC

dai

check the cables to the drives have not come loose

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Pharaohz

Boot order a factor here you think dai?

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dai

check the bios is still set the disks to raid if thats what you are installing

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MalakithSkadi

Cables arent loose... tried that already.
Boot order is irrelevant it doesnt detect the hard drive so its not going to boot to them no matter where I put it in the listing and it doesnt appear in the list when you manually select either as iv already pointed out
Tried setting the bios to RAID and it didnt make any differance plus I seem to remember last time I had to change it back to IDE for it to work.

dai

set as ide then and see if it picks them up
i have never used raid only the raid capable ports
usually there is a section in the back of the manual for setting up for raid
best i can come up with we have no raid people online at present i can pm

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MalakithSkadi

Tried setting to IDE as well.
I think I will have a delve into some of the other sections of the BIOS see if I can find anything. This whole raid setup has been a pain in the rear since the day I got it but stupid motherboard doesnt seem to have any other option.
Will see If I can find the manual

MalakithSkadi

Had a read of the manual, all it tells me is to press Ctrl + I (might be + L, bad print but iv tried both) then use the raid controller to setup the drives.

I dont get this option though, I get the first Post Bios screen where it checks the CPU, Memory, USB etc. Then normally where itd jump to the second screen and display the option to enter the raid controller (with the Marvell drivers it was Ctrl + S, but the manual is on about Intel Raid which I also have drivers for, iv tried both neither work). But this second screen never appears it just instantly jumps to

"please enter a bootable device" type message.

The hard drives deffinately work as when installing XP it detects the correct volume size for both of them if they were to be combined (just under 300GB, their two 150GB drives).

dai

checking to see if i can find a raid member

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Terrister

Please post make and model of computer or motherboard.

Look in bios for hard drive setup. If it is not in raid mode you can not configure it with the raid utility.

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MalakithSkadi

Ok motherboard seems to be differant to the paperwork I was given with the PC... lovely.

Anyway it matches the manual so "Asus - P5W64 WS Professional"

Tried the bios in every Hard drive configuration avaliable and I know it worked with "Standard IDE" the last 4 times iv re-formatted. Still get the same result, doesnt even make it to the second POST screen.

This weekend was going to try putting in an IDE drive, put windows onto that and see if I can see the drives from there, as windows seems to be able to detect the sata's when it installs it follows that it should. Doesnt solve the problem but its a possible work around to get my PC back up and running which means I can stop typing these messages on a PS3!! (not fun)

MalakithSkadi

Just looked into my actual board a bit more, im going to swap my drives to the second RAID controller, see if that might be whats causing the issue. Will post up my results.

MalakithSkadi

Raid Controller was dead, second one works. Iv now got a seperate problem with the GFX card so off to the relevant board with that one.

Terrister

ok. thanks.

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