Disc troubles on SB750

[>HyperlogiK<]

I just purchased a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H and have been running into problems with my HDDs. I want to run a Raid 5 array of 4 Seagate 7200.10s for everything, and then migrate system files to an SSD when I have the money.

But, despite the RAID manager allowing me to define said array, windows won't install.

When I use XP, fdisk will partition the array, and the format will go to 100%, but apparently it won't complete because when setup restarts it sees the partition as unformatted.

When I use Windows 7, setup will partition the array, but when it tries to format I get error 0x80070057.

So I thought that RAID 5 might be slightly borked with this being a new board and I tried setting up a Raid 10 array. But the same thing happened.

So (despite the fact that they were all working in my old machine) I thought that one of the discs might have begun to fail.

So I deleted the array and tried to install to just a single disc (using the first and second drives) and Windows 7 install failed at the 'Extracting Files' stage with just a black screen.

I'm guessing that either all of my HDDs have died at one through mystery disc voodoo or that there is some kind of problem with the SB on the board.

But, if any of you gurus have any other suggestions they would be very welcome.

[the_cultie]

Its quite possible that the RAID chip has a limitation on what size of an array can be bootable. I remember when I was building a rig for a friend with an x48 mobo that the intel raid chip could have a bootable array size of 1.xx TB. I was using 4 750GB hard drives so I ended up making a 500GB RAID 0 for the OS and games, and a RAID 5 array with what ever was left. I havn't created a RAID on a SB750 based mobo so i cant say if you can create two raid's on the same drives.