Rapture raid0 setup problems

[timpanogos]

Just purchased another 74G Rapture, downloaded the lastest "Platform/nForce Drivers - nForce4 AMD - Windows XP" driver set from NVIDIA site (6.70), and copied the IDEWinXPsataraid folder to a floppy.

 

Followed the instructions in the Tutorial and all goes as expected until the second XP pro installation reboot - where it appears the installation thus far is corrupted.

 

Rebooting to the installation disk and doing the "R" repair option - drops me to a C: prompt, and chkdsk actually fires up here, but reports errors - chkdsk /r runs quickly to 50% and then seems to hang.

 

DOS RAID setup, total NTFS format, initial installtation file download, first reboot good, second set of "windows" mode file down loads - no errors, no complaints - but at the point it should reboot into the new installation - everything is corrupted on the stripped drive.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Chad

[red930]

How are the temperature on both drives, have you checked? Your system has not been overclocked, correct? Which SATA ports are you running the drives on? How did you go through the Array setup on your drives?

[Nebulous]

Could be also the XP disk could be dirty or the lens on the rom is dusty/dirty, thus causes corruption of installation files. Happend to me several times untill i swapped out roms and cleaned the disk, then all was perfect.

[White_Hair]

The SATA port shouldn't matter. My setup followed the instruction and was perfectly fine. Check the tutorial again see if you missed any steps. Download the raid driver and put it into the floppy. You will only use the floppy during install windows (read the tutorial again) You have to enable the raid on the sata port that your drives connected to. Or download the DataGuard diagnostic ulti for DOS and run it to test your hard-drives. Might be bad sectors. Hope this will help.

[lowboy]

Saw this post and thought the end days had come, the rapture was upon us then realized it was just a raptor on the prowl. he..he

[timpanogos]

just updated my sig - as I moved from the high voltage vm mem to tccd. Got a occt 9 hour torture stable bios setup on this ram before starting in on the raid install with these setting. After having problems, I tried an install with bios settings reset to "optimal" (i.e. all autos), same thing.

 

Using ports 1 and 2 -

 

one question on the BIOS RAID setup portion, I am setting the set of two stripped drives to bootable. It seemed like I had to disable the c drive as primary boot in bios if I did not? Other than this all seemed well per the tutorial?

 

Download the raid driver and put it into the floppy. You will only use the floppy during install windows (read the tutorial again) You have to enable the raid on the sata port that your drives connected to.

 

White hair - I was confused about this part also - got the two required drivers loaded off the floppy at the "S" time, with format to follow (single partition of expected size). However, I never saw the dialog boxes that Angry shows during the "windows" installation phase - I noticed that the A drive was accessed during this time and figured that since I never removed the floppy after the original "S" setup that all was well and it simply grabbed files from the A drive .. maybe my problem here inlies?

 

The chkdsk was suspisous because 50% was the failure point - I was also confused in the tutorial as to if some amount of "boot partition" was required - I took the whole partition (leaving an 8mb fragment of some kind)

 

Chad

[White_Hair]

No need for really creating a boot partition. In the raid utility, there is an option you can make that stripe to be bootable.

 

You don't have to diable C: in the bios. It's better that your windows is SP2 embedded version. I heard the previous versions of Windows is quite problematic with setting up RAID during installation.

 

Also you should hit F6 when during the windows installation (it should says at the bottom of the screen when boot with windows installation disk - Hit F6 to install 3rd party or SCSI driver..etc). Then press S, then you should see the driver list poped up (like the one started on page 3 in the tutorial.

 

For my setup, I cut the partition in 2 (100 G each) One is for windows and one is for temporary data / media files.

 

Start from Page 3 in the tutorial is most likely the stuff you need.

 

http://www.angrygames.com/DAGF-3.htm

 

Hope this will help.

[White_Hair]

The 8 MB fragment is normal. It is always there doesn't matter how may partition you created. You can just take the entire partition and the 8 mb fragment will still show up.

[timpanogos]

I may end up hating myself for not creating a slipstream ... I have an external true-image that I made before tearing down and adding the new drive, and just wanted to criple the new installation to the point of getting true-image up and restoring the image .... dang, may need to go back to one drive just to get a slipstream built ... anyway, also grabbed a bootable cd of the western digital lifeguard diagnostics (I'm at work now) and so will try all these things again tonight.

 

Thanks White hair

[White_Hair]

No problem.

 

By the way, if your system is overclocked. You might want to change it back to default before installing windows or creating raid stripes. Some overclocked system is not stable enough for installing windows. After installation, you can oc it back.

[red930]

So you pressed F6 right when Windows installation started right? I hope you got the Raid drivers installed at the beginning, cause reading what you said sounds like you didn't and that might be your issue here.

[espionix]

On the nVidia Download Driver page, just click RAID Floppy Image on the left, instead of extracting and stuff, worked for me.