Hitachis Deskstars in RAID 0 can't be seen??

[kempez815]

Hi all.

Fist of all - specs are in sig - apart from the two Hitachi Deskstars that I've just added to my computer.

 

They are:

 

2 x 40gb Hitachi Deskstars 7200RPM SATA 7K250

 

I have put these in RAID 0 to use as the drives I run my games off. They are NOT my boot drive and in fact windows and games run fine on my normal IDE drive.

 

The problem I am having is that Windows does not show the drives in "My Computer" at all. I can "remove" them (in the tray) but I cannot see them to save to/install a game to.

 

Here's what I did to setup:

 

Installed SATA wires and power cables as usual...easy stuff. I'm using SATA 1 and 2.

 

Booted into BIOS and checked that SATA 1 & 2 were enabled.

 

Enabled RAID and went into RAID menu and enabled all physical SATA ports. I did not enable RAID on IDE posrt - do I have to??

 

Went into RAID BIOS and selected "striping". Added both drives and cleared the data from them (they were new )

 

Rebooted and went into Windows.

 

Suffered the agonising pain of having to ring MS again (7th time) to activate windows as I've changed my hardware again

 

Got over that and booted into windwos, installed drivers from diskette I got with mobo.

 

Rebooted to make sure all was ok....went into "My Computer" and saw only my partitioned IDE drive

 

Checked the control panel and saw the nvidia RAID partition there, but not in "My computer".

 

Cried a lot lol

 

I knows this is a long one, but I wanted to put as much detail as possible.

 

Anyone help at all??

[Guest Tmod]

I don't see where you actually partitioned and formatted the drives.

 

Did you do this?

 

Tmod

[kempez815]

I don't see where you actually partitioned and formatted the drives.

 

Did you do this?

 

Tmod

 

No I did not. Where can I do this? Is it an option in the RAID BIOS?? I assumed I would be able to do this in windows.

[OceanSeasforMe]

unformatted and not read. Raid is a drive overlay.

 

format stripe via : control panel / administrative tools / computer management / *(storage tab) disk management. *(select the drive and it should allow format with a right click.

 

something like that, or that should be close.

[Guest Tmod]

You can use Fdisk from microsoft for that task.

 

I use a 3rd party software for these tasks as it gives me more control.

 

Tmod

[Guest Tmod]

OceanSeasforMe,

 

He never partitioned the array either. Need a partition before you can format.

 

Tmod

[kempez815]

unformatted and not read. Raid is a drive overlay.

 

format stripe via : control panel / administrative tools / computer management / *(storage tab) disk management. *(select the drive and it should allow format with a right click.

 

something like that, or that should be close.

 

By jove I think he's got it!!

 

Seriously - I found it in there and its partitioning/formatting. I'll report back with the results.

 

Thanks for the advice dude

 

Update: This indeed did work and I now have a nice RAID 0 drive for all my games to go onto. Thanks my friend

[ncsa]

Once you created the partition, on the reboot the BIOS should post that the RAID array is good. Do you get this message?

 

Also Windows should have found a new device and the RAID drivers will need to be installed before you can create and format a partition. Under device manager is there a SCSI / RAID Controller installed?