Its been one hell of a bad day.

[lowboy]

Lets try to clear up what were dealing with:

1st: what OS did you try to load at the very first? 32bit or 64bit

2nd: are you still showing a partioned disk

The important? Did you ever try to load windows64, because you said it was showing: 1partioned and1unpartioned disk,making it sound like windows had already started install. If you started a win64 install it will be looking for 64bit drivers.

[Guest Spartacus]

If you had bad floppy drives, the diskettes you were using in the bad drives may also be trashed. Any diskette that you had in the drive if/when the data cable was upside down (access light on solid) will now be bad, it won't reformat properly either.

 

If a diskette is giving you trouble, toss it and use another one. I had to do that myself just yesterday when loading raid drivers.

 

Make a readable diskette on the computer that works and then use it on the other one.

 

What can happen sometimes though when using two floppy drives that are both working, you may find that they can't use each other's diskettes. That happens due to head alignment being bad on one or both drives, or just that the tolerances swung in opposite directions.

 

If you get tired of messing with the floppy drives, you can make yourself an XP install CD with the raid drivers on it. You never have to hit F6, XP will see the raid drivers and load them. You have to create an unattended install file and it's a very tedious PIA to make it work. I made one with drivers for a raid controller card when I was running Win2K and it was nice to have.

 

There are details around on many places if you Google it.

 

.

[dyeinbreed]

*snip*

 

Ive got a cd burning containing winxp pro wSP1 the raid drivers and ethernet and smbus drivers integrated using nlite. Hopefully that will work. If not its a sad day again.

[dyeinbreed]

so the cd with integrated drivers did not work.

[lowboy]

Just so you know the drivers are not your problem. Just a hint !

[dyeinbreed]

Just so you know the drivers are not your problem. Just a hint !

 

then what is?

 

I didnt try to install windows xp 64 (i dont even have it), If its not the drivers I dont know what it is.

 

Im trying to burn the cd (Im loading the drivers from the sataraid folder instead of the legacy folder, dont know if it matter but im running low on ideas)

 

I figured raid wouldnt be a cake walk to set up, but this is a nightmare.

[Dynomutt]

thats one heck of a problem you got there might i suggest runnings a few Passes of Memtestx86 from the BIOS to make sure memory is working ok.

hope this helps

[dyeinbreed]

well she works (and boy is it fast). Thanks all.

 

In case anyones wondering, I took fernandos approach and slipstreamed the raid/ethernet/sbm drivers into windows xp along with service pack1 and made a whole new bootable xp cd personalized to my settings. That worked like a charm and everything is up and running.

 

Thanks to all for the help and suggestions <3

[davidhammock200]

CONGRATS! :nod:

[Cascadesss]

The floppy disk that is named "SATA RAID Driver Disk" is the correct one to use. It has both the NVIDIA nf4 and Silicon image 3114 RAID drivers on it. But before you hit F6 on the installation, you must enable the following in the BIOS:

 

1 - Go to the "Integrated Peripherals" setup page, Select "RAID Config" and open that page. Be sure the "Raid Enable" is enabled. Also enable the "Internal Phy SATA 1,2,3,4 RAID" (All 4 of them) on the bottom of the page.

 

2 - Go to the "Genie BIOS Setting". Near the bottom of the page, be sure the "Internal Phy SATA 1/2" and the Internal Phy SATA 3/4" are enabled.

 

Save and Exit the BIOS setup

 

Performing the steps above will insure that the 4 nVidia RAID channels are enabled. Why turn on all 4? You may want to add other SATA drives, or move the drives around. You never have to worry if the BIOS is set correctly for the SATA setup.

 

Now, reinstall Windows and just about immediately press F6 when the installation asks if you have any raid drivers to install. When the installs Drivers page pops up, press “S”, put the Floppy disk in, select the nv4 drivers and press enter. After that has loaded, press "S" again as there are a total of two drivers to install. Select the 2nd driver on the list and press enter again. After the 2nd driver is loaded, just press Enter to continue on.

 

A little while later in the installation, it will ask for some additional drivers on the same disk. After those are loaded, remove the floppy disk.

 

Let us know how it goes.

[Dynomutt]

nice one