Raid drivers? 2 raptors/Abit AN8-SLI

I seem to be having trouble getting my two raptors to work in raid (just got the second one). I hooked the second drive up, fiddled around with the bios and got to the option about enabling raid, next boot up i pressed F10 to set up the raid, it detected my two raptors and i set it for "striping" (raid 0 to the best of my knowledge) and i expected it to have to load or format it but..no..did it almsot instantly and said it was now one 138 gig drive thing now, alright then.
I put the xp cd in and it loaded, i formated the 138 gigs and it started loading the small files and it automatically restarted after it was done. upon restarting it said "disk read failure" after posting and paused. after about 15 minutes of frustration and retrying to load/format it, it did the same thing. i went back and disabled the raid function and xp loaded on my new raptor, so at the moment im sititng here with xp on both drives (i would have thought formating them would have deleted the stuff from the old drive) and wondering if i needed to press that stupid F6 button int he beginning to upload some raid drivers.

So, my question is, do i need to install raid drivers? or is something else wrong, and i THINK i know how to get the drivers (im sure my floppy di sk is long gone)

thanks

Yes you'll need to install raid drivers. Go to your motherboard's download section at Abit's site and it should have some kind of utility that'll extract drivers to a floppy disk so you can hit f6 when you first boot off your cd.

Edit: I just went to your mobo's download section and they don't have the drivers. Since your board is nforce board, and the drivers are nvidia specific, you can just download these drivers. Click on Utilities, and it's the 3rd one called, nVidia Chipset driver disk for Windows 2000/XP/2003 & Windows 64bit XP/2003 (WHQL). It allows you to create the floppy disk that you would use for f6.

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A8N32-SLI Deluxe

I noticed one more thing, Abit nor Asus has the most up to date chipset utility. I'd go to Nvidia and download the latest chipset utility there.

Well here is the thing - without the raid drivers you'll never be able to see the space within the XP installer. It will tell you that it was unable to detect any storage devices.

If you can access the drive and format it within the XP installer - it's getting the drivers somehow (slipstream?)

Go into your bios, select the Boot menu and look under the hard drive option. Make sure #1 is your Nvidia Stripe, not some other drive, USB card reader or something else taking that primary spot. Chances are the the problem is within the bios IF you can see the disk space, format it and the XP installer copies the files over.

roYal said:

Yes you'll need to install raid drivers. Go to your motherboard's download section at Abit's site and it should have some kind of utility that'll extract drivers to a floppy disk so you can hit f6 when you first boot off your cd.

Edit: I just went to your mobo's download section and they don't have the drivers. Since your board is nforce board, and the drivers are nvidia specific, you can just download these drivers. Click on Utilities, and it's the 3rd one called, nVidia Chipset driver disk for Windows 2000/XP/2003 & Windows 64bit XP/2003 (WHQL). It allows you to create the floppy disk that you would use for f6.

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A8N32-SLI Deluxe

I noticed one more thing, Abit nor Asus has the most up to date chipset utility. I'd go to Nvidia and download the latest chipset utility there.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the help so far, but i still havent managed to get it to work, i went ot the site Royal said on Asus' site and downloaded the utility and made the floppy. I loaded up the xp cd and pressed F6 and the floppy recognized, it downloaded the drivers and went on. it recognized the partition of 141800 some odd megabyes (both raptors combined) and formated it, restarted the computer and got Xp to start loading set up the computer name/network stuff and such. but when it gets done and it tries to load up xp, the little bar just passes a 4-5 times and the computer restarts...i never get the chance to set up accounts and such. i've retried it like 5 times and i cant get it to work.
is it possible their the wrong drivers or something? what else could be wrong

Bump, anyone else?

xnewnx said:

Bump, anyone else?

Click to expand...

One quick question for you:
When you went to go format the drives did you select "NTFS Full Format" or "NTFS Quick Format"?

Dom

I've tried both, a few times. most of the time i try quick, but when it didnt work in this case i tried the one that wasnt quick. Still didnt work

xnewnx said:

I've tried both, a few times. most of the time i try quick, but when it didnt work in this case i tried the one that wasnt quick. Still didnt work

Click to expand...

I had a very similar issue to you in the past. Using full format completely eliminated the problem.

Dom

I think i may have the wrong drivers, but ill try it once more right now.
on the lap top at the moment

i was wondering, could the problem have to do with the jumpers on the HD's? right now they're stock with a jumper connecting pins 1-2

I think i may have figured out the problem, i think i have to flash the bios to a newer version to get it to work. im going to try that next...
a little scary, cause i've never flashed a bios before...oh well

What version of Windows Xp are you installing? Something w/ sp2 I assume. I have heard of a problem like yours before w/ something to do w/ Windows Xp and raid. Something like w/ out Sp2 it does not work w/ most raid setups very well causing corruptions, random reboots, and etc.

raid works fine with XP-pro without sp1 or sp2. I have an IT copy of xp-pro without either. Its all I every use. I just have to download the 50 updates(including sp1&sp2) after install. Before I load anything else.

At least on Intel stuff.