I ran into this issue when I tried to install Vista onto two "right out of the box" SATA drives that had not yet been initialized or partitioned. I had to "initialize" the drives before installing Vista.

Nurn,

I think you’re on to something.

How exactly did you initialize the drives?

I’m trying to load Vista 64 on only two of my four drives (RAID 0 on the two 74 GB Raptors) for an eventual Vista 64/XP dual boot setup.

I had this very same setup when I had the Evga 680i SLI motherboard installed and it ran fine and did not give me any problems loading Vista 64.

By the way, thanks for the link to the Microsoft info. I’m pretty certain that this is the problem; the symptoms that are mentioned in the link are exactly what I’m experiencing.

I also noticed that with the Maximus Formula setup I have all four drives showing up when I go to install the RAID drivers in Windows setup. With the Evga 680i board only the two drives that were configured in the Nvidia RAID utility are present during Windows Vista setup. I’m wondering if the two drives in RAID and the other two spare drives are causing the confusion with the X38 chipset. It almost sounds like the two spares will have to be disconnected during Windows Vista setup.


Asus Maximus Formula SE / BIOS 901
Core 2 X6800
Corsair XMS2 Dominator 4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400/C-4)
Evga 8800 Ultra “Superclocked”
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
2x WD 10,000 RPM Raptors (74GB) (RAID 0) -Windows Vista Ultimate/64 Bit
2x WD 10,000 RPM Raptors (150GB) (RAID 0) -Windows XP Pro/SP2
PC Power and Cooling 1000Watt SR
SilverStone TJ-09 (Black)