W2K Pro installation on Fastrack PCI IDE-RAID 1

[TJones8]

OK, my HDDs are on a IDE-RAID 0 (stripe) set up, Fastrack TX2000 PCI card (dual ATA133).
I have no HDDs on my mobo IDE ports, just two CDRW\DVDs, Zip250 & Seagate Travan tape drive.
I also currently have a linux & win98 setup, what i was gonna do is during the w2k pro installation, reformat my fat32 as ntfs and install w2k pro there (it's the 2nd partition).

When i try to install 2k pro, i press F6 to load up my Fastrack RAID drivers from the floppy drive. After loading some other stuff, it finally gets me to pick the drivers from the disk. Originally, I just picked the win2000 TX2000 drivers, but i have subsequently tried loading WinNT & XP drivers aswell with no luck)

After all the driver loading, I get a Disk I\O error (00008000) but w2k attempets to continue.
Unfortunatly, all i get is a flicker of HDD activity and then the light stays on perminatly and the installation hangs.

If i don't load the drivers from the disk i can get as far as chosing disk\partition to install (I still get the same Disk I\O error) only i can't access the drive since there is no fixed drive on any on-board IDE channels!!

Any help is appriciated as i'm stuck here!!

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[mapleleaf]

TJones8,

There are a few things that could be wrong.

Are the drives that you have connected for Raid 0 the same ??

Does you BIOS have a setting for Boot Sequence. Since the TX2000 is a SCSI card, it may need to be set to SCSI,A,C.

Is your Array set to be bootable ??. See Page 54 of your manual.

Ian

Everyday the Computer Gods pick one person to be "it". Maybe, today is your day !!

 

[TJones8]

The TX2000 is an IDE card, does it emulate SCSI??
I am currently booting into Linux fine, so I don't think it's any of my BIOS setting, but I'll go ahead and give them a try anyways...
I'll set the boot order to CDROM,SCSI,A...

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[TJones8]

After chaging the boot order I still get the W2K pro stalling when trying to setup after loading all the drivers.

I even left i for half an hour to make sure it wasn't just my impatience, but alas the HDD led came on and did not go off as usual and installation hung.

Cheers anyways, any other ideas??

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[MSEDDE]

I had these very same cards and had a difficult time with them. Come to find out the jumper settings are wrong in the manual if you have Western Digital Hard Drives. I took all jumpers off of my Western Digital Hard drives and boom shock a locka.......IT LIVES>>>>>>>>>>>>

ME

 

[TJones8]

Hmm, I have a couple of Maxtor 30Gb ATA133 7200rpm drives...
But if it was a HDD jumper setting then surly the RAID card would refuse to acknowledge the drives??
Worth a try, but i dont wanna have to re-create my array either as Linux is working quite happily and we know what a stickler for correct hardware configuration that can be...

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[mapleleaf]

TJones8,

Windows always sees Promise cards as being SCSI.

There are updates to both the BIOS and Windows drivers from May 2003 on Promise's site. As a user of prior Promise cards under Windows, I've found that having the latest drivers and BIOS is a good thing !!

Go into the promise BIOS during bootup by hitting <Ctrl>F. Choose Option 3 and tell me if there is a &quot;*&quot; showing beside the defined array.

Ian

Everyday the Computer Gods pick one person to be &quot;it&quot;. Maybe, today is your day !!

 

[TJones8]

/me kicks self

How many times do i tell friends and family to check for the latest versions of drivers??
ugh!!

So, I updated the BIOS and loaded the new driver disk and things went very nicly indeed...
Typical!!

Thx to all, i will be LARTing myself as punishment.

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[mapleleaf]

TJones8,

Tis always a toss-up. Do I upgrade to the latest or do I wait. I've always found where VIA and Promise are concerned, it pays to be an early adopter.

An off topic question for you. I'm going to add Linux to one of my machines. Is there really a difference between all the distro's out there ?? A recent poster pointed me here

http://www.gentoo.org/

Ian

Everyday the Computer Gods pick one person to be &quot;it&quot;. Maybe, today is your day !!

 

[TJones8]

Oooh, the big question!!
What is the deal with all the different Linux distros!!

Everyone will have their favorite and for desktop usage, mine is SuSE.
But I did go through about 5 different version of different distros before I settled.
Best advice I could give you is suck 'em and see.

For a retireing Windoze user, something aimed at non-techies like RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are good, with only very small differences between them (like what the package manager is and what fonts come installed etc...)
But the difference between one of the 'desktop' distros and a 'proper' distro (such as Slackware or Debian) is huge.

If you got a week or two to spare, then choose something like Deb or Slack as it will teach you far more about linux itself.
If eye candy is your thing, then anything that comes with KDE 3 will suit you.
Unfortunatly, I havn't had any experience with Gentoo itself, but I hear it's something of a happy medium.

As for Linux, I've got a server running Debian 3 (currently just a file server, will be web & mail soon!!), my desktop runs SuSE 8.2 (when I'm not gaming), and i have a Smoothwall firewall. I even saved up and got myself a Zaurus PDA.
Hell, even my car stereo runs linux (

http://www.riocar.org)!!

If you want any more advice, mail me : timj13@ntlworld.com

if at first you don't succeed, get a 10lb lump hammer

 

[mapleleaf]

TJones8,

I've been a CL hacker since the day of DOS (still run OS/2 every once in a while), so I think it's the down and dirty that I need.

I'll give Gentoo a try, then Deb or Slack.

Thanks !! and I'll keep your email in case I need it !!

Ian

Everyday the Computer Gods pick one person to be &quot;it&quot;. Maybe, today is your day !!