Help configuring RAID Array

john_lickman · 15 Aug 2006 at 16:55

Help,

I'm trying to configure a new RAID array but am having no luck with it.

My system has an Athlon 64 x2 +4400 on an Asus A8R-MVP motherboard. It's been happily running Windows XP on a couple of old Maxtor IDE drives for some time now. When the larger of these old drives failed recently I decided to invest 4 new Maxtor Maxline III 250Gb drives with a view to setting up a RAID 0+1 array.

I removed the old IDE drives and installed the new SATA II drives and the BIOS recognises them just fine. However, when I enable the RAID Boot Rom so that I can run the RAID configuration utility things seem to go wrong.

I press CTRL+A to load the config utility and I get a message saying Identifying IDE drives . . . . and then I wait for about 5 minutes (I've timed it) before getting a menu of options. I select crate a RAID0+1 array, enter a RAID name and then press Y to confirm. About 5 - 10 minutes later it says it's created the array.

However, when I try to boot from my windows XP installation CD it says it can't find a disk drive to load Windows onto and exits.

What am I doing wrong? I don't have an IDE drive I can boot from. Do I have to format the SATA drives first? Are there some jumper settings - the drives have jumpers on them...

Any help would be most welcome.

Thanks

John

Phil99 · 15 Aug 2006 at 17:16

Do you have a floppy disk with RAID drivers that came with the mobo?

The RAID array is probably being setup fine, but XP doesn't have every single RAID driver built in so can't see some controllers (and therefore the array) until you provide the drivers.

john_lickman · 16 Aug 2006 at 14:47

Thanks for the reply. I've tried cutting a driver onto a floppy disk, but none of my other PCs will do it. I insert the Asus driver CD into another system and select the "Make Disk" option, but it comes back and says no item found. Seems I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. I can't create a driver disk because I don't have a system running the RAID controller and I can't create a system running the RAID controller without a driver disk.

I think I'll go back to an abacus

john_lickman · 18 Aug 2006 at 09:27

Still no joy!

Done everything by the book and no luck. My disks work fine as seperate SATA drives, but not when I try to configure as a RAID.

Windows won't see them as a RIAD, even when I load the driver disk. The ULi Configuration utility won't see the RAID when I re-enter it, even though I've just created it 10 minutes earlier!!!

Just been reading on the ASUS support forum that their is a compatibility issue between Maxtor disks and the ULi RAID controller. Anyone else heard anything about this?

Bubo · 18 Aug 2006 at 10:47

I recently had some bother with raid on my asus av8. This mb has two sata/ide controllers, via and promise. I originally had two ide drives in normal mode plugged into the ide ports on the promise controller, and according to the manual you still need to use the sata driver on the cd when installing windows. When I bought a couple of sata drives I put them on the promise controller and moved the ides to the via ports. Set the satas up as a raid 0, partioned/formatted them with partition magic and let windows reboot. It did not detect the drives. Looking at the controller in device manager it said it could not start. I put a new windows install using the same driver floppy I used before and the same, windows couldn't find them. After a bit of digging I found that the driver it made from the cd was wrong for sata. I went direct to the promise website and downloaded a driver from there. Updated the driver in device manager and it detected the drives ok. So if I was you I'd have a look on Promises site and download a new driver, might be the cd has created the wrong one. Thats if you are using the promise controller of course.

john_lickman · 19 Aug 2006 at 01:21

Fixed!

The problem seems to be with the firmware on my Maxtor Maxline III drives. There was a comment on the Asus support forum that warned about an incompatibility between the ULi RAID controller on my A8R-MVP board and Maxtor disks.

I spoke to the nice people at Maxtor in Ireland, gave them the firmware version of the label on the disks and they emailed me an update.

Once applied, everything works as I had always expected / hoped it would. The RAID setup utility recognises the disks in about 1 second (not the 5 minutes it took before) and configures the raid almost as quickly. What's more the RAID definition "sicks" so that I can still see it when I re-run the setup utility.

My system now boots up in seconds, not minutes and after supplying the RAID driver disk Win XP loaded fine and runs sweet as a nut.

Thanks for everyone's help.