Diamondsleeper
New Member
I know this is long but please check this out. System info. Three WD 74gig Raptor drives. 2gig of Corsair 800mhz Ram. AMD 4600x2 64 CPU. Has anybody run into this problem? Have not been able to install a Windows XP Pro operating system in the Bootable RAID 0 configuration or any Bootable RAID configuration for that matter. I can set up a RAID config on drives after I do a regular install of XP on a single Non-RAID SATA Drive config. No problem. I want my operating system to be on a RAID 0 set of drives though for best performance. Here is where I believe the problem my be. I have the XP disc but it is not a bootable XP disc. Microsoft provides a set of 6 setup floppies that can be downloaded to be able to initiate and install the operating system using the non-bootable XP Pro disc. I can do this routinely with one of my other systems which is on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. It installs flawlessley onto two RAID 0 configured WD 74gig Raptors. With the M2N32-SLI board the problem seems to stem from the RAID drivers that have to be installed manually with the F6 function at the beginning of the install. I give setup the drivers it asks for provided by ASUS for the M2N32-SLI board. Then continue with setup by putting floppy #4 back in. Before it finishes with floppy #4 I get the message "nvraid.sys or nvataraid.sys cannot be found" and setup must exit. It's usually is the nvraid.sys message but a couple times it has been the nvataraid.sys msg. These are the two RAID drivers I just loaded into setup with the floppy created using the ASUS driver CD for the M2N32-SLI board. For some reason setup loads these drivers but then doesn't recognize them. I tried putting those files onto floppy #4 in case it was looking for them there. That didn't work. I've tried everything I could think of. Tried recreating new floppies, Tried new floppy drive. Recreated the RAID drivers on new floppies. Checked and rechecked the Bios settings. That's all correct because after I install the operating system on a single SATA drive I can setup RAID 0 on the remaining two drives using XP. I have been able to install a second XP operating system onto the newly created RAID 0 drives. That kinda solved my problem but I'm not satisfied. The problem then is I still have to have the single SATA drive physically installed as is or the system won't boot. Even if I'm only trying to boot to the second operating system. Disc management is showning the single SATA drive as a system drive while the RAID 0 drive(s) is shown as a bootable drive. Apparently there is still something on the single SATA drive that is needed by the second operating system or by the bios or whatever in order for the second operating system to boot. I don't want the RAID 0 drives dependant on the single SATA drive in order to boot. I want them to be independant of each other. I only want the single SATA drive for backup storage. Any suggestions? Sorry this is so long but that's the only way I know how to explain it. 