Baffled...

Ashman UK · 30 Jul 2007 at 21:35

Ive presently got my vista os on an wdc 500gb sata II hd fine.

I put the os on this single drive as before i had the os on 2x150gb raptor x's in raid 0 till i started getting odd errors and odd things happening and orthos blend/stress test would always fail after a minute and i saw that one of my two raid drives came up with an error in the intel matrix storage manager.

So at the time i reset them to non-raid disks.

Now i can use the error free raptor x as a spare hard drive in vista next to my 500gb sata II which has the os on it.

I want to re-install vista on the single raptor x but for some unknown reason when i load the vista installation disk in and when it goes to detect the hd's it picks up the 500gb sata II hd but not the raptor x ever.

Both the sata power and sata cable is connected to the raptor x.

It shows up in the bios fine and again as a spare drive in windows but for the life of me i cannot get the vista installation disk to pick the raptor up to install vista on it.

I have checked this raptor in windows with hd tune for error's and it comes up fine.

Is it because it cant be used any more because its been used as part of a raid set-up or simply reseting it to a non raid disk should be ok to use again as a single drive?.

Any ideas? :confused:

this ones doing my nut in a little..lol

rpstewart · 30 Jul 2007 at 23:07

Which SATA port is the Raptor connected to?

The ADW9D-MAX has 2 SATA controllers, the Intel southbridge one and a discreet Silicon Image one. If the Raptor is on the SI one the Vista install may need drivers to access it.

helmutcheese · 30 Jul 2007 at 23:45

Run a low level format tool on the Raptor(s) it prob will fix any errors.

Get it on a controler thats got driver support, the Silicon one wont work without drivers at Windows install or you could install its driver after installing Windows using the Intel controler, I would rather use the Intel on the PCI-E bus esp for Raid0, as the Silicon on the old PCI bus has a limit of 133MB/Sec and that incs your burst speed.

rpstewart · 30 Jul 2007 at 23:55

helmutcheese said:
I would rather use the Intel on the PCI-E bus esp for Raid0, as the Silicon on the old PCI bus has a limit of 133MB/Sec and that incs your burst speed.

Correct sentiment but not quite on the detail - the Intel controller is in the southbridge so it's straight onto the front side bus, there's no detail in the Abit manual for the SI controller but chances are it'll be connected as a PCIe 1x device, so a 250Mb/s limit, better than PCI and fine for a 2 disk RAID0 array but not much more.

helmutcheese · 31 Jul 2007 at 02:01

I doubt it, all onboard (not onchip) are on old PCI bus, to be on the PCI-E bus would mean being in the chipset and it aint that case.

rpstewart · 31 Jul 2007 at 08:57

If you look at the Gigabyte manuals (the only ones which still have a block diagram) the discreet SATA controllers are on the PCIe bus. There is no difference to wiring a controller to the PCIe bus than to the PCI bus, both are just slots which are not externalised.

Ashman UK · 31 Jul 2007 at 09:28

Hi peeps and thanks for the suggestions.

I have actually sorted the problem out.

What i think happened was, when i reset the disks to non-raid (specifically the error free raptor) it made them "unbootable" and perhaps thats why the vista installation disk would not pick the raptor up.

So i took a long shot and went to western digitals site from the sticky second from top of this forum and downloaded there data lifeguard protection tool kit.

With this you can analyse, format, partition your wd hard drives and i found that even though vista reported the error free raptor as an ntfs drive when i used the tool from western digital to analyse the error free raptor, it did not come up as an ntfs drive and reported that it was not bootable.

So with this tool i formated and made the disk bootable, went back into the usual vista installation process and it picked the raptor up straight away and i now have my os installed on it with no problems

Shame about the other raptor coming up with an error when tested with hd tune as this was the disk that came up with an error in the intel matrix storage manager when i had it in raid 0 with the error free raptor but i can rma it back to western digital as provided by the sticky near the top of this forum.

Thanks again for ya suggestions.

p.s. ive got the raptor sata cable connected to the intel sata controller not the silicon image one.