2x160GB SATA-2 RAID - DFI

[Alex[RM-UK]]

Hey,

I am trying to set up SATA-2 RAID with my new hard drives. They are 2 160GB SATA-2 Maxtor Hard Drives, and I currently have a DFI Lanparty UT-Ultra-D Motherboard which has the latest BIOS.

I have attached the 2 SATA-2 hdd's to the nVidia SATA ports (1 and 2) and have also enabled RAID in the BIOS and selected the 2 hard drives that I want RAID enabled on.

All that works fine and the BIOS picks them up fine, so I let it boot up and press F10 to get into the nVidia RAID Utility. In there I select Striping, and leave it on the Optimum Block setting (64kb). I then put the 2 hard drives I want in the RAID array over to the box on the right and hit F7 to make the array. Now in most guides that I have seen, it says as soon as you press F7 it comes up with a green box saying 'Clear Hard Drives' (or something like that) but with me it doesn't.

It just freezes, but the HDD light is on all the time from when I press it. I thought this was werid and restarted the PC after about 10 mins of it beeing like that. It then said that I had a faulty array and I tried to delete it but it would not delete. After many restarts and playing around I finaly got them to delete. So now I tried to make the Array again, by pressing F10 etc etc, and it never came up with the green box again. So far I have left it doing what ever it is doing for just over an hour now.

I am just wondering if this is correct? Is it suppose to take this long to build an aray of 2x160GB hard drives? I was thinking it was like formating them or something so it would take time. Please can someone tell me if it's suppose to be like this and if it's not what am I doing wrong? I've been trying to get them working from 11:00AM today, it's now 16:15 and am starting to get frustrated that I can't get it to work.

Please can someone help me? it's killing me. :confused: :confused:

[Alex[RM-UK]]

Anyone, Please this is absolutly crap.

I managed to get it to make the RAID Array, some magical reason it just decided to make it. So I set about installing Windows, and I formated the hard drive, it got to 100% and said 'The Disc was unable to be formated, the disk is either damagaged yadayadayda' .. so I restarted the PC and it has not buggered up my RAID array, now I can not delete the damaged array and I can not create a new one.

Why the beep is this not working? It just refuses to delete or create an array, i've followed about 5 guides now to get RAID working and I have EVERYTHING correct. This has to be the program that is at fault, not me. Why is this doing this! :confused: :confused: :confused: It's now 21:00, thats nearly 10 hours of work to get RAID to work. Please someone help me before I have no hair left.


oook, We've finaly got it to boot into the windows install and it has reconised it as 1 300GB hard drive, Hooray. But.....When we go to create a partition it just hangs for a few mins and then goes back to the main Partition page with no Partition made. I know that WinXP has limitations on the hard drive size that it can have, so I even tried making an 80GB partition that I know works. It did the same thing, it just hung for a few mins and then went back to the main Partition screen with no partition made at all. The XP Disc I know works, so it can't be the disc, although I will try another one soon, so why is it doing this? Please someone help me.

[Kunaak]

enable all sata ports.

after you create the array, make sure you select boot, in the raid options.
default, is not to boot.
you have to make sure that it is set to boot.

then in bios, make sure you select the proper drive under hard drive priority, after you create the array.

[Alex[RM-UK]]

then in bios, make sure you select the proper drive under hard drive priority, after you create the array.

I just looked at that and it says SCSI - nvraid array or something like that. I shall go and enable all of the SATA-Ports now, will that fix the partition problem?

[stu_allen]

What bios?

"latest" is irellivant, there are several.
Have you checked the disks out prior to this? Try formatting them manually (slow format) to check they arent damaged.

[Alex[RM-UK]]

The BIOS I have is N4D623-3.exe from the DFI Website. the 2 hard disk that I have are brand new and arrived yesterday morning, so I just put them in and started to set up RAID.

How do I format a hard disk manually? Is it with the Win98 cd and fdisk? or does that only do Partitions?

[gundamit]

You have PM.