Help required, not booting from RAID discs?

DoubleCheese · 7 May 2009 at 23:34

My PC had been working pretty flawlessley till 6.20this evening. I had ordered 4Gb of OCZ RAM and a new 1TB drive to backup my digital photos and music.

The PC had two 250Gb WD drives in RAID0 for booting and some data and games. 99% of the pictures are backed up onto a separate drive as well, but it was running out of space so I got the new one to replace it.

Anyway, took out the old RAM, installed the new. Booted, went into BIOS to reset the OC, loaded Optimum settings, setup the SATA controllers to RAID so they would pick up the two discs. Restart and nothing....some new RAID configuration boot screen appears tries to load windows then BSOD's. Thinking it was faulty memory I swapped back the old memory, tried again and no luck, same thing.

The two discs don't appear in the BIOS general settings screen, only in the Boot disc screen.

Any ideas on how to set up the BIOS again to boot off the RAID discs?

Ch3m1c4L · 8 May 2009 at 10:25

when you say you set up the controllers to be raid, did you set the individual ports to raid? you didnt accidently knock one of the cables out a little bit when installing the ram? Why did you even have to reset the sata stuff to raid? it shouldnt hav elost the setting, although you say "loaded optimum settings", if you mean you let the bios load its own settings then WHY? they arent optimum for hardware normally, since you then have to reconfigure most of the bits afterwards anyway :/

Post a pic of your sata config bios screen, and anywhere else in your bios that has anything to do with sata/hdd's please.

rpstewart · 8 May 2009 at 10:57

DoubleCheese said:
some new RAID configuration boot screen appears tries to load windows then BSOD's.

When you say a new RAID config screen appeared you mean this is something you hadn't seen previously?

How was the RAID0 array on the two 250Gb disks configured before you installed the RAM?

Did you move the array drives onto different SATA ports or anything like that?

Why did you need to reset the SATA ports to RAID mode?

DoubleCheese · 8 May 2009 at 12:12

Thanks for the replies. Let me try and answer.

I had to re-configure the BIOS settings because when I installed the new RAM I reset the BIOS. There was already OC the machine and I didn't want to risk BSOD'ing with the new memory if any settings weren't compatible. Wish I hadn't bothered now!

So after resetting the BIOS I loaded Optimised Settings, went into Standard CMOS settings and the two WD discs appeare under the IDE channels.
Under Integrated Peripherals I set the SATA controllers to RAID

Save and Exit....PC reboots and this is when I got the new RAID conig screen. The two discs are shown, but they are identified as non-RAID discs. Skipping past this the pc starts to boot, the Win XP splash screen comes up and then BSOD's.

Going back into the BIOS the discs no DON'T show up under Standard CMOS settings anymore. But they show up under, Hard Disc Boot Priority, the two discs individually and then Bootable Cards.

This is from my memory of last night. I'll go through it again tonight and grab some screenshots too.

errata · 8 May 2009 at 12:42

last time something similar happened to me the bios defaults turned on ahci settings when it had been off, something simialr thats changed needs identifing (manual?)

mobo and raid controller info would be helpful with screen shots

these some chance you may recover easily if the raid controller has just tried to read something and failed but not if its overwritten vital config data.

BSOD could still be wrong memory defaults so worth doublechecking everthing

Ch3m1c4L · 8 May 2009 at 13:07

yea, check the voltage on your ram etc as stated above, and the ahcio will cause BSOD's on certain configs (HP workstations if you try to format them anyone?)

DoubleCheese · 8 May 2009 at 22:21

Ok, I'm stumped! After trying various BIOS settings and checking and rechecking the cables and BIOS I just loaded Optimised Defaults and restarted the machine...It loaded Windows just like before! So I thought, DOH! it wasn't RAID at all, you fool...to test the theory, because I really did think I had set up the two discs in RAID, I shut down and disconnected one drive. It wouldn't boot. missing OS. I unplugged the other disc and reconnected the first one....same problem, missing OS.??

So, are the two discs are in RAID0? The motherboard settings are not set up for RAID and it works as it did before I started messing withit. What the heck is going on? Can someone explain?

rpstewart · 8 May 2009 at 23:07

Go into Disk Management (right click on My Computer and pick Manager) and see what Windows says about how the disks are configured.

DoubleCheese · 9 May 2009 at 00:23

Ok, there are 3 disks: disk 0, 1 and 2. 0 and 1 being the two SATA WD drives, and Disk 2 being an IDE drive that I use to backup to. All are partitioned into various sizes.

Disk 1 has a partition D: which is the Boot drive
Disk 0 has my games installed on it (C

and is showing up as System.
All the disks are Online, Healthy, Partitioned and Basic.

?

rpstewart · 9 May 2009 at 07:51

Well if you can see the two WD drives showing as individual volumes then they're not configured as RAID0, if they were you'd see them shown as a single drive.

DoubleCheese · 9 May 2009 at 10:39

Thats exactly what I thought when I saw it. Could it be that some information during setup was written to the other disk making it essential to the sytem, hence it won't boot without it? Very odd...

rpstewart · 9 May 2009 at 11:09

What you've got is a classic case of what can happen if you install windows with more than one disk connected. You've got the files which are required to boot the system (boot.ini, ntldr etc) on one drive and the Windows directory itself on another. This means that the system needs the d: drive in place to actually boot but without the c: drive there's nothing to run.