Cannot get Win to boot

[SteveLord]

ok, so i decided to do a fresh install of my system. unplugged my 80gb SATA and my 160gb IDE. i had originally installed using windows setup files on my raptor and my 80gb sata. windows MADE me do this.

 

i heard if u keep the other drives disconnected, u can avoid that. so this is what i did.

 

ive been at this for hours. i get through the winxp setup screen, with the timezone and network setting stuff. but then when it reboots, it goes to the windows logo with the loading bar...and after seeing it for about 20secs it reboots itself. safe mode, same thing. the orange light stays on, doesnt blink...and then reboot.

 

this is WITH installing the latest nvidia raid drivers from the site. oh by the way, the program does a TERRIBLE job writing to a floppy. i kept getting errors saying it was an unrecognizable file system. then i formatted and copied myself to get it to work.

 

after failing over and over. i gave in and plugged in the 80gb SATA. now it seems windows AUTOMATICALLY cleared the hard drive for me. thanks, there goes all my game/hardware patches.

 

after installing windows to either drive and have either one set to BOOT from the RAID setup screen, i still CANT get past this.

 

i dont know what to do. i hate how WinXP's SATA support is retarded or whatever else it is. i dont know if its a mobo issue or it not letting me put windows on my RAID 0 setup or what.

 

if anyone with some experience in SATA/RAID setups can lend some insight, id be appreciated. i cant believe what a pain in the butt these things are. ive never had these issues before.

[yekim]

Out of curiosity, did you try installing on a single SATA disk?

 

This doesn't sound much like a Windows issue to me. Are you sure you have the raid drives set correctly in the BIOS, *before* trying to load the driver during the WinXP installation?

[EdLSmith]

READ these Rules.

[SteveLord]

no thanks, ill ignore you since you didnt explain anything.

 

 

 

it somehow is working now. i installed windows to the 80gb, with setup files on the raptor stripe. and in the RAID setup i had the raptors set to BOOT.

 

at first i thought it was gonna hang and reboot, but it moved on. yay.

 

so do whatever.

[KimTjik]

SteveLord: it was a bit hard to understand how you had done the setup and installation. It seems like you're most concerned to get RAID to work, or?

 

If you run it in RAID every mistake will be fatal, since the information in RAID0 is splitted between two hdd:s, there's no way you can simply recover what is saved on one of them. But I suppose you're clear on that.

 

If you have saved information on hdd:s, but decides to change the setup, you ought to do a backup. That's common sense. Personally I also make some convinient partitions, so that I can save programs and other files on another partition than the one where you have your OS installed. When you install XP it won't automatically clear your harddrive; you give the instruction like: on what partition in will be installed, add or delete a partition, format a partition and how and so on. (On the other hand, if you're talking about a RAID0 you'll lose what you have if trying to just use one of them). A Windows OS will run best at the first partition.

 

Probably you know all of this, but nevertheless try to be a bit more specific to what the main problem is, and how you got there.

[SteveLord]

my main problem was that i could never get past the windows loading logo....no matter what.