WinXP Disk Boot Failure after upgrading to 728 BIOS

[nate]

This evening I upgraded the BIOS on my LanParty UT CFX3200-DR to the 7/28/2006 release using WinFlash.

 

After the upgrade, I reconfigured the BIOS to disable the SiI3114 RAID controller and enable the ULi M1575 controller (my configuration before the upgrade). I have two Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA drives attached to the ULi controller. These drives are configured as a RAID-1 mirrored pair with Windows XP installed on them (i.e., they are the primary boot drives).

 

After rebooting, I entered the ULi RAID BIOS (v1.22) and saw that the mirrored pair looked fine. However, when I rebooted I got the following error message from Windows XP:

 

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

 

Upgrading the BIOS appears to have rendered Windows unable to access my RAID array and hence unable to boot. I never upgraded the Windows XP ULi drivers from the v1.0 drivers that shipped with my motherboard and which I used for the fresh WinXP install on the RAID array. My guess is that the old ULi WinXP drivers are incompatible with the new ULi BIOS.

 

If I boot using the WinXP Setup CD and use the ULi F6 driver disk that shipped with my motherboard (v1.0), I can see the single NTFS partition created on that RAID array. But if I try to actually install Windows on that NTFS partition, Windows setup informs me that "this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition." It's weird that setup can detect the partition but cannot use it; again, I'm guessing that my old Windows driver is incompatible with the newer BIOS.

 

How do I get out of this? Is my best bet to flash the ULi BIOS back to an older revision (425, 417, or even 328)? If that works, should I then update the Windows driver to the latest ULi drivers and then trying flying to the current ULi BIOS?

 

I guess I'm not clear on the correct procedure for flashing the RAID BIOS and upgrading the RAID drivers on an existing Windows XP install (as opposed to a new install).

 

Many thanks in advance!

 

________________________________________________________________

 

DFI LanpartyUT CFX3200-DR 939 (BIOS 7/28/2006)

AMD Athonl64 X2 4200+ 2.2G Manchester

2x AMPO 1GB 184-pin DDR 400 (PC3200)

Gigabyte VGA 1300 GV-RX13128D-RH R (ATI Radeon X1300 w/ 128MB GDDR2)

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 (250GB 7200RPM SATA, model #HDS722525VLSA80)

Cooler Master RS-500-PCAR eXtremePower 600W

[Guest erico]

Welcome to DFI Street!

 

The first thing that you need to do is create a signature. Then you can easily get some help.

BTW the error you are getting could easily be your Memory timing settings.

Show some details in your signature (i.e. DDRAM part number/ PSU/ Video Card)

[nate]

What I'd like to try to do is directly upgrade the ULi WinXP driver, but I don't know how to do that without restarting WinXP - which I can't accomplish until I update the driver. Bit of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. So I think I have to rollback the BIOS, get WinXP to boot, and then upgrade the driver and BIOS in that order...

[RGone]

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm You might want to read up on something like that article...since you swapped to the new bios and did not update the raid drivers to match before flashing, you are correct in assuming where you are...oh and there are tons of articles on doing a same folder 're-installation' of winXP but that was just a very precise one with a ton of warning caveats listed...there is one huge problem with continuing as you are and that is winXP itself trying to boot can make the drive almost un-bootable again.

 

Since raid 1 is nearly useless in a home computer since raid 1 will right any virus to both drives and any error to both drives...it has little value except as a hedge against one drive or the other failing and that does not happen much today...some but seldom. Knowing raid 1 is like that...I might unhook one of those drives so data is not lost if you need it and install windows on the other drive with a raid driver and see if I could get the data off and safe...really have dug a hole if a repair install or flash backwards in bios and raid rom does not work to allow booting windows to insert new raid driver first...myself and not having any previous problems since you mentioned none...would in now way flash away from a previous working bios...

 

RGone...:confused:

[nate]

Thanks for the tips. As a last resort I plan to do exactly what you suggest: unplug one of the drives to preserve the data, reformat and re-install on the other drive, then copy back over the original data, and finally rebuild the mirrored partition.

 

I do want mirrored for drive failure protection. I have too many large files with no other backup, and don't plan on trying to back everything up to DVD.

 

One of the things I'm still unsure of is whether the ULi controller is even going to work. I was seeing the infamous m5288 error in WinXP which I was I tried to upgrade the BIOS in the first place. I'm considering switching over to the SiI controller, but I have had terrible experiences with Silicon Image RAID controllers in the past and would like to use SATA 3.0 Gbps. Is the ULi controller still problematic on this motherboard?

[RGone]

well since you flashed bios to address some uli issue and are dead in the water...there is no clue to whether you bios flash/drivers will have positive affect on your situation or not.

 

RGone...:confused: