[Sleepy_Steve]

I have two 250gb 16mb 7200rpm SATA 2 drives.
I am trying to set them up in a raid one for redundancey of my OS.

As far as I know, the drives are good, bought from a repudable person on our classies... and seen by bios right away. And have not made any suspicious clicks.

They sit on a 965 chipset. (Asus P5B Dlx)
I have the jumpers off to try and use the full SATA 2 speeds. (I think this may be the case, but have seen nothing to indicate this in the mobo literature)

Bios sees the drives. The bios sata mode has been set to Raid.
Hitting Ctrl+I got me into my ICH*R raid setup prompt... where I set up a raid 1 array using the two sata drives. (the only sata devices on the system, sitting on ports 0 and 1)

Untill this point, all is working propperly... at least I thought so.


I pop in an Ubuntu 6.10 disk to try and format the drives and then partition them using grub... At first it tried to boot, but was getting hung on some sort of hard drive memory buffer. Then I tried my XP CD... It loaded files into memory but couldnt find a hard disk to use. Tried my Win98 boot disk to see if I could boot that and maybe format to FAT 32 and go from there... Still nothing, it gave the same sort of error message the XP disk did, but in windows 9x lingo.

What the hell is going on with this install?


Also, this is coming after my old C drive stoped booting propperly a week or two ago. I thought the drive was corrupted. But who knows, maybe some firmware virus is atacking my southbridge firmware... I figured that background info might help.

[traldan]

I've never set up RAID, but don't you need a floppy with RAID drivers to pop in during the Windoze install?

[Evil_inc]

try increasing the cluster size if you can. Maybe flash your bios with the current version just to rule out the bios virus thing.

[Sleepy_Steve]

Oooohhh, never got far enough into the windoze thing to do the raid driver instal. I could try it again and see if it comes up... but I get less and less out of it each time i try and boot.

Also, the drives likley came out of a raid 10, and Im not sure what effect this might have on an OS picking them up as a different raid config. Ive only done a Raid 0 in the past, and that was with fresh virgin drives.

[bing]

For ICHxR in WinXP, you'll need F6 Driver disk method during OS installation, you can d/l it here, or you could slipstream the driver using nLite. On Vista, it will detect it automatically.

One thing that interest me, did Ubuntu really detect the Raid volume you created ? Not individual drive of couse, cause its known that Intel is not being nice to linux community regarding ICHxR Raid driver.

[Sleepy_Steve]

It may not have read it as a raid volume... which could have resulted in my funny hard drive memory buffer error.

I sure hope I can use a CD for the F6 driver disk, as I dont have a FDD on my laptop. (Other rigs with floppys are down for less serious reasons lol)

[cw823]

Originally Posted by Sleepy_Steve

It may not have read it as a raid volume... which could have resulted in my funny hard drive memory buffer error.

I sure hope I can use a CD for the F6 driver disk, as I dont have a FDD on my laptop. (Other rigs with floppys are down for less serious reasons lol)

It must be a floppy to load drivers. When I pulled them it was from a Raid 5, but if you went into the RAID and configured, that shouldn't matter at this point.

Can you install on just one drive (just curious)

[Sleepy_Steve]

Think so... windows didnt seem to mind when trying to instal on only one drive. But Ubuntu stalled out again.

But I think I have to hold off on giving the problem any more attention till at least tomorrow night or friday... A couple summer classes Im taking are coming to a close and are really demanding most of my attention at this point.

[Sleepy_Steve]

And what is up with Intel matrix storage... I need to give that sticky up top a good look through.

It almost sounds like you can have a raid array, and with only two drives, set it up as a raid 0, and then split the raid 0 array into a raid 1... using only the slow parts of the drives for the mirroring. -- Freaking nuts... and amazing too.

[Sleepy_Steve]

Awesome!

[Sleepy_Steve]

Awesome! Its going through its full raid 1 format as i type this.

I may be speaking too soon, but the F6 drivers were key... although it took some working to find a FDD that would successfully format and write the needed drivers to the disk because windows still seems to only want to use the A drive. Anyway, it seems like its working now and I am pleased to have my conroe looking like its doing better.

Thanks for the help everyone!!