RAID 0 Problems on ASUS P5B Deluxe

ray t · 10 Nov 2007 at 17:05

Hi all. I've just finished my 1st home built pc and have switched it on. Firstly, from advise, I only installed one hd to which I installed XP Pro X64. This booted fine and all was well. I then added another 2 barracuda hd's. After installing them, I turned on the pc and entered the BIOS menu. From there, I followed the directions in the mb's book, and turned the 2x new hd's into a RAID0 volume.

Now my pc will not boot. It gets as far as the WIN XP logo, then restarts.

Any help would be greatfully recieved

rpstewart · 11 Nov 2007 at 11:22

Sounds like you've flipped the BIOS setting for the SATA controller that all the drives are attached to into RAID mode. This requires a different driver to be loaded by Windows, unfortunately it doesn't know this so is continuing to try and boot with the IDE mode driver - hence the restarts.

With that board it is possible to shuffle the drives between the two SATA controllers to encourage Windows to load the Intel RAID drivers but it's a bit of a pain and not without risk.

ray t · 11 Nov 2007 at 18:34

How would I do that then? And what are the risks?

I was planning on just formatting the drive that contains XP Pro, then reinstalling it, but also adding the Intel Matrix drivers when asked to do so. Not too sure how to do all this, but someone mentioned pressing/installing something called F6.

Any ideas?

rpstewart · 12 Nov 2007 at 08:52

ray t said:
How would I do that then? And what are the risks?

It involves ensuring that the system has the drivers for both SATA controllers loaded, swapping the system drive onto the other controller and booting from there. What that does is it allows you to mess about with the settings for the main Intel controller while still having access to the system, you can then update the Intel drivers to the RAID version and swap the system drive back.

In terms of risks you are messing about with some pretty fundamental configuration settings so there is always the possibility that if it goes wrong for whatever reason the system may not be recoverable.

Backups are therefore essential, even more so than normal.

ray t said:
I was planning on just formatting the drive that contains XP Pro, then reinstalling it, but also adding the Intel Matrix drivers when asked to do so. Not too sure how to do all this, but someone mentioned pressing/installing something called F6.

Any ideas?

This is the safer option. Basically you have to hit F6 when prompted at the very start of the XP install, this tells the installer that you want to add more storage drivers before the disk partitioning stage. It'll then prompt you to give it the drivers on a floppy (it won't accept them from anywhere else) so you need to be organised beforehand. Other than that the installation is as normal.