Need Help Please

DayTrader

DayTrader

New Member
Earlier, I was trying to setup RAID on my computer, but during the Vista installation it needed the RAID drivers and I don't have a floppy so I canceled. Well, by doing this, something happened and when I booted up windows, it restored it to a point sometime in the past because my desktop was setup like i used to have it. So i inserted the Vista disk again and "repaired" it. Well, the next time I booted up, I was taken to the Windows Boot Manager - see the screen shot I've attached to this thread. It says, "Choose an operating system to start, or press TAB to select a tool:" Well, if I select the second option, Windows Vista (TM) Business (recovered), then everything is fine, but the first option continues to take me to my past setup. So my questions are what have I done? How can I automatically boot to the recovered settings rather than having to choose it each time I boot?

Thanks for any help!
 
Last edited:
Oh very interesting! I've never heard of such a thing. I'll have to research this, but I certainly appreciate your pointing me in the right direction. Thanks!
 
Well, I tried to slimstream using vlite. I took the RAID drivers from the disk that came with my motherboard and integrated them into the vlite iso file. However, during the Vista install, when I get to the part where I am supposed to install drivers, the drivers cannot be found. I even click on Load Drivers and browse to the drive that the vlite file is on and it still cannot find them. What am I doing wrong?
 
This is the file you should have downloaded.

15.51_nforce_winvista_64bit_mcp55_whql

After you download the driver it gets extracted to this directory.

C:\NVIDIA\nForceWinVista64Eng\15.51\IDE\WinVista64\sataraid

This folder contains your raid drivers. Is this where you did the drivers?
 
Now I've got myself completely confused. I put the drivers onto my USB flash drive and loaded them during my Vista install. It didn't appear to work, so I just installed Vista without proceeding with the drivers. But now, under My Computer, it is showing only 1 hard drive the size of one of my hard drives (465GB). When I go to Device Manager, under Disk Drives, it says NVIDIA STRIPE 931.52G. In the bios it shows that RAID is enabled as STRIPE. So, did I somehow manage to get RAID working or what? I'm scratching my head over here!
 
Last edited:
Oh and every time I reboot, it briefly prompts me to press F10 to Enter The RAID Setup Utility but after a few seconds, if I don't press F10, it continues on to load up Windows normally.
 
As far as I can tell it's properly setup. in the CMOS > Integrated Peripherals > RAID Config I have RAID enabled as well as SATA 1 and SATA 2.
 
Last edited:
Oh and in the RAID Setup Utility it shows:

Boot: [checkmark]
Status: Healthy
Vendor: NVIDIA
Array: STRIPE
Size 931.52G
 
When you installed windows, did you by chance only partition half the total drive size? Look in disk management to see if the other half just needs to be partitioned, formatted and assigned a drive letter.
 
Ah, yes, that was indeed the case. So this means my RAID is not setup then, right? I'm still curious why when I go to Device Manager, under Disk Drives, it says NVIDIA STRIPE 931.52G :confused: Clearly, I'm a total newb!
 
Can you post a screen shot of your disk management screen? If you only partitioned half the total drive size then you just format the balance of it and use it.
 
Hmm, for some reason I can't upload images anymore. Here's a link to imageshack: http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/7526/printscreenq.jpg

I've already begun formatting the drive as you can see in the screen shot.

printscreenq.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So everything is working correctly now? Did you assign that partition a drive letter?

By the way, I edited your post so that it would show the image.
 
According to the disk management screen it is. You have 2 500gb drives in raid 0. The problem was instead of just using making the whole drive 1 partition, you partitioned half of it. I would have made a smaller partition of say 75 to 100 gb and then used the rest of the drive for my personal data.

Just remember to back up your data regularly to a different drive or media, cause if one of the drives dies on you, you lose all your data.
 
johnb35 said:
The problem was instead of just using making the whole drive 1 partition, you partitioned half of it. I would have made a smaller partition of say 75 to 100 gb and then used the rest of the drive for my personal data.
Click to expand...

This is a little confusing to me. What would the 75 to 100GBs be used for? And how can I undo my current partition and then create this 75 to 100GB partition?

I really appreciate all your help! :)
 
In my opinion, its best to create a small enough partition to hold the windows operating system and any games/apps you may install with about 25 percent overhead so that defragging may occur. Windows defrag requires 15 percent free space in order to defrag.

If you want to change your setup now, you would have to delete the parition you just formatted. (sorry) and then right click on C and click on shrink volume. Then shrink that size down to what you think you'll need and then the space taken away from that will be added to unallocated space from the parititon you just deleted. Then you can partition, format the second part of the drive, again....

Hopefully I just didn't literally confuse you.
 
Haha, yes, a little confusing for me, but I'll figure it out hopefully. I just need to do some reading. Thanks again for all your help!:good:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top