Win 2000 Boot Failure with IBM HD's 2

[mwittmd]

Help!

I have just assembled an Athlon 1.33 266MHz system with a Gigabyte GA-7DXR mobo (that has Promise RAID ATA100 capabilities) and two IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40GB hard drives configured as RAID 0 (striped). Using fdisk and format, I have managed to partition the 'drive' into one 80GB drive and format it without complication. I then load Win 2000 off the CD, adding the Promise drivers in the setup (by pushing F6), and let the installation continue. The problem occurs when it asks to reboot => the computer reboots but will not boot off the HD. If you boot off a floppy, you can read the data on the HD. What is that?

Gigabyte emailed me that this is a known problem with IBM 40GB drives, and I need a firmware update from them. I cannot find this update on IBM's site, and IBM has not answered my e-mail yet.

What is happening? I need help, 'cause now all I have is a heavy and expensive paperweight!!! s-)

 

[Guest_imported]

Greetings,

I had the same problems with my computer, too.
Athlon XP 1900+
512 MB RAM
ASUS A7V266E
onboard RAID (Promise Fasttrak 100)
2 40GB IBM Hard Drives
Win 2000

Whenever I installed Win2000 I got the BSOD "Inaccessible Boot Device" although I did install the RAID drivers during installation.

However, a look on ASUS' website revealed that some BIOS settings have to be set in order for Windows 2000 to recognize the array. These were:

Load Onboard ATA BIOS = enabled/auto
SCSI / ATA100 Boot Sequence = "ATA 100 / SCSI" ( ATA100 before SCSI )
Other Boot Device = "Onboard ATA Boot Device / SCSI"

Boot sequence: Other Boot Device needs to have a higher priority than IDE

example:
1. Removable Device
2. ATAPI CDROM
3. Other Boot Device Onboard ATA Boot Device / SCSI
4. IDE Hard Drive


This worked well ... till I updated the BIOS from revision 1004 to 1007. After the update (no problems) Win 2000 had the same problems again. So I tried to fix the BIOS settings (which I had forgotten to change) but with no success. And here I am again...

Any ideas anyone?

 

[jebus]

Hey guys,

Asus A7V133
2 40 gig maxtors, ata 133, 7200rpm
768megs of ram
OS windows 2000
1 30 gig maxtor 7200rpm running my OS

I have fought with it over a week and memorized the manual. taken my board out, checked it, taken my drives out, formatted them fat32 and ntfs. I have updated the bios to v1008a. i have downlaoded the fast track drivers and the v160b33 drivers. I tried it from a clean install, i have tried it from booting of the 30 gig with the OS on it. tried updating the drivers through the device manager.
I get an error:This device cannot start. (Code 10).

I tried fdisk, and formatting through dos, but it didn't recognise the drives even being there. What ever anyone has said in this forum and any others, i have tried.

I think computers are trying to off me.

I beleive its something small and stupid that I'm missing.
possible a bios update, done.
a partion for a master boot, ??? unsure of that
driver updates, tried whut i could find from asus and promise sites.

I truly do not know why this won't woork for me. Maybe it computer karma and me threatening to through it out the window has something to do with it.

Any comments or answers would be of certain help and gratitude.

Thank you

Jaret

 

[Guest_imported]

I just purchased ibm 60 gig. Tried to install win2k in 8gig partition but failed on boot. Had to change partition to 4k then system would reboot ok. Installed on ata66 first then added changes for promise ata100 support. Don't know what was magical about 4k partition.

 

[Guest_imported]

I'm using the MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU with two IBM Deskstar 60 GXP drives (40 GB each) attached to the promise lite RAID controller, in RAID0. It works perfect. I've created 2 partitions of 4GB each, for Win2K and Win98. Another 10 GB partition is used for applications and games. The remaining 62 GB is an extended partition with one logical partition in it.

I don't know if it's still a problem, but there's something called the 1024th cyllinder. Many OS'es on a partition which reaches beyond that cyllinder cannot be booted. Maybe Windows 2000 can, but a 80 GB disk might still be too large. Windows NT 4.0 even can't boot anywhere from such a drive.

 

[dorky]

I too had similar problems with win2k install on gigabyte mobo with onboard RAID set to 0 and inaccessible boot device stop error. I went through almost every suggestion on this board and the only thing that worked was taking "graustern"'s suggestion (march 27/02) and re-arranging the BIOS boot order so RAID/SCSI boot attempt would be higher in priority than IDE (HDD0). Upon thinking about this, it makes good sense. Give it a try before throwing it off your deck and thanx to everyone for all the help.

 

[Guest_imported]

Hi, I have an ECS K7S5A board with an innovision (CMD) RAID controller connected to two IBM 60GXP 40Gb disks, both set to master on their own channel with nothing else connected. I have a striped (0) array and have installed Win XP pro sucessfully and win 2K also sees the array quite happily. Talking about firmware, the software that came with my controller reads the firmware details of the disks connected to the controller and says that the drives have different firmwares so there ARE different versions for this drive. Also, one drive is made FOR IBM and the other is made BY IBM (made in different countries). I did however have problems with the first controller I had; I installed Win XP onto the array fine and rebooted several times after installing drivers and software and the like. The next morning, I came to switch the machine on and received the "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" BSOD error. No amount of fiddling would fix it and I sent the controller back. I got my money back because I returned it under the long distance selling act we have in England that means we have 7 days to inspect the new goods before we decide to keep them or not. The seller (

http://www.ebuyer.com)

claimed that there were no faults with the controller when they tested it so that only leaves the drives at fault, but I have now had Win XP running for two weeks quite happily on the array and no problems. Wierd, either ebuyer was lying or the drives have some problem. (SMART and DFT don't pick up any errors).

 

[Guest_imported]

Ibm 60gxp 60gb IC35L060AVER07-0 p/n 07N6655
1, 2 months old, has been running 24/7
mass storage drive
after formatting a 120gxp then reinstalling Windows 2000on primary drive... then restarting; The drive gave me the click of death... Is on a Promise Ultra100tx2

Is there any way I CAN GET BACK MY DATA!!!
Im going to try to LOW LEVEL FORMAT this puppy... if that dont work ima return it for a new one and put a waterblock on it b/c I have heard this problem is due to heat

 

[Guest_imported]

Hey Everyone, I don't know if this helps or not, but I had the worst time rebuilding a server with a Promise Fasttrak 100 PCI RAID controller a couple of months back. The OS (Win2k) on the server went south so the decision was made to upgrade the hard drives in addition to rebuilding the OS. 60 Gig IBM drives were purchased. (the description on the drives are “IBM IC35L060AVER7 Ultra DMA/100 60GIG HDD 7200 RPM”) I couldn't find the original Promise RAID install disks, so I went to the promise website and got the latest drivers and tried a fresh install. I got a BSOD. Not certain, but I think it was the "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" error that was mentioned earlier in this thread. Didn't matter if I installed the card during the Win2k setup or if I put the primary HDD off the main controller, then installed Win2k, and finally added the driver and card (per the instructions). same problem. Drove me to the brink of insanity! What finally worked for me is after searching the promise website for the older drivers--the ones which I knew worked with the smaller HDDs—and not being able to find *ANYTHING* I went out to

http://www.archive.org/

and found an older Promise.com site. If memory serves, the FastTrak Family v1.30 b33 driver worked for me with a caveat: It seams if you try to multi task on the system with the promise controller while you are restoring a mirrored array in Win2k, you could get a serious BSOD witch could result in not being able to boot up--ever. (Please note this has only happened once) What I have done to ‘prevent’ this is to not touch the machine and allow the fastrack build utility to finish what its doing before doing anything else. This hasn’t happened when a workstation user accesses the server across the network during a rebuild, only when the server was accessed locally; but then again, who knows. Hope this helps!! Would like to hear feedback. Cheers!!

 

[Mattze]

Gigabyte GA 7vrxp with Promise Raid on board, Athlon XP 1800+, 2 IBM Deskstar 120 GXP - 40 GB HDs - raid 0, ATI Radeon 7500. Same problem.

w2k: system worked very instable.
New install Win 98: system worked fine for 8 hours - then crashed so badly that it wasn't able to reboot win 98.
(with the newest drivers for all components)
Moreover Explorer reported only 40 GB of 80 GB HD space.
(might be solved by another fdisk or repartitioning)
Installed Win 98 without raid config - 2 separate HDs.
Seems to work better but is still instable.

German Gigabyte support: power supply with 300 W is too small, get at least 350 W.
Installed 400 W power supply - first boot crashed but then worked again.

Asked support for Bios config: they said I shouldn't use "Top Performance" features - my components might not match as well together (since I use no no-name components this made me a little angry). OK - I did so but it didn't work much better. Moreover I should install this mysterious IBM HD Bios update

Now I'm trying a last Win 98 install with another partitioning tool, using the latest bios and drivers.
If this doesn't work I'm trying another MoBo.
Gigabyte seems to run quite instablewith these features...

 

[babu2001]

Like most of you,I've got the same problem when installing XP or Win2000 on my Asus A7V133 with RAID. I'm using two Quantum (Once upon a time, there WAS a great hard drive manufacturer...) AS 30 Gig for my strip array. Even if I strike the F6 key to install the Promise driver, it will give me a blue screen before I can do a thing. So, I decided to bypass the problem. I installed XP on an "old" 13 gigs WD and when everything was perfect (all the patches and drivers installed), I installed the raid driver. After a reboot, I was able to work with my drives again. Then,I simply ghosted my WD on my array. That doesn't tell us what is the problem but, the goal is to have the computer working, right? As we can see, many HD and mobo have the same problem in raid configuration. My only conclusion is the Promise chipset is at fault (Microsoft can't have all of them...

 

[Guest_imported]

I spent the last 5 hours trying to get this gosh darn thing to work. GA-7VRXP, AMD 1800+, 512mb 2700DDR 333mhz, 2 IBM 60GXP 40GB, Promise PDC20276 controller. I created a striping array and booted up Windows XP from CD. Installed the driver (which took me forever to find because the manual didn't say anything about a driver). Sometime between partitioning my drive and copying XP files, the computer gives me the blue screen saying Page Fault Error in Non Page Fault area, something like that. I have no idea what that is and would like some help. Please, anybody....

 

[Guest_imported]

Thank-you EJRosentha!(earlier in this listing) I have an ASUS p4b533-e mainboard with the Promise "lite" controller. I tried for hours to get two striped 80 gig IBM drives to boot with windows 98 or windows xp and it just would not work. Then I found this listing and it reminded me to try FDISK /MBR and it worked like a charm.

 

[Guest_imported]

Wow, so I am not the only one! I have GA-8IRXP and IBM GXP120 60GB + GXP75 60GB with P4 2.0a and 1 Gig DDR 2100.
Tried to install W2K Pro with latest Promise Fasttrack133 driver, drives Stripe Raid 0, flashed the Bios and tried again .... W2K won't boot and gives me the "NTLDR not present, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot"... although the first few times I didn't even get that far. W2K now shows me one HDD with 120GB, and a second one with 60GB!!! I tried creating a 40GB partition on the large drive to boot on, but no sucess. Pity I tried again, I had a classic IDE1 boot on W2K which ran perfect before.

It seems from what I read previously that it's not a IBM GXP issue, other drives produce the same result. Could this be a Win2K problem?
Has anyone managed to use the raid as a secondary drive in Win2K or XP?
I've sent a service request to GA in Germany. Let's pray!

 

[Guest_imported]

6 weeks ago I bought an Intel D850emv2 MB with 512Kb of Rambus. Promise Tx2000. Also 4 WD 120 gb hard drives. Intent was to set up a 0+1 Raid. At first no BIOS and then I went to a PCI VGA video card and got results. I did an base install of WIN 2000 and also put in Service Pak 2. then I put back in the nVidia gForce3 AGP card and on boot, it got to the splach screen for WIN 2000 and froze half way through the boot. Called Intel (nothing is its fault) and also Promise. Promise says that they are having problems with the nVidia chipset becuase it supercedes the Promise RAID card BIOS. They are working with nVidia to correct. I was advised to try and ATI 8500 w/o firewire or an ATI 7500. I have an ATI 7500 in another machine and tried it. It did not work! Back to the PCI VGA Video and it boots up fine. Does anyone have any suggestions. I have Promise and Intel pointing at each other and I don't want to start buyin video cards hoping to get one that works. BUT, it definitely appears that Promise has problems coexsitng in certain environments with AGP video.

 

[Guest_imported]

Well, I'm sure most of you have figured it out by now if I'm reading this correctly, because I had the same problem at first and was wondering "wtf". I didn't read all of these posts so I'm only answering the first one (I was searching for a correction to some BIOS issues with the MSI K7T266 PRO2 mobo)...but anyway, you need to go into you your bios and choose the primary boot drive to be C: . I set up A: and D: as my secondary and third choices.

Now, I can tell by reading these posts, none of you are idiots of course and this seems like a very simple solution. So if this wasn't the answer you were looking for, I apologize.

 

[Guest_imported]

Hi guys,

I want to let you know that I have solved my mystery in regards to no being able to install XP/2000 on my A7V133 with 2x 40GB Seagate HDDs connected to onboard ATA100 RAID, running Raid 0.

The following website has the instruction on how to get it working on A7V133/A7V266 motherboards:

http://www.a7vtroubleshooting.com/troubleshoot/ts_hdc/

It's a matter of getting the correct jumper settings for freakin' Raid to Work on WinXP....also minor bios settings (I think someone may have mentioned bios setting ealier).

Anyhow, the whole thing is on the given page.

Cheers,
Dino

 

[CrackTheRipper]

Watch out for Western Digital drives. The documentation that came with them incorrectly indicates jumper pin placement. They decided for you that the pins should be set to fool the bios into thinking that your drive is under 33gig, not taking into account that this will hose things up when installing win2k. This config is even pasted on the drive itself.

Later documentation, quietly distributed as jumper config settings with the WD-Data LifeGuard software, shows that the jumpers should basically be removed in most cases.

Thank you Western Digital, you uncle F%@$k-ers. What are you boys smoking, anyway ?

 

[silvafox]

Sup all- some friendly input- ASUS A7v333 x2WD 40GHDs raid-1
after a week of struggling to bring system up w/ new HD's, I was reduced to configuring 1 hard drive to my primary IDE connector while still keeping RAID enabled on MB. I then proceeded to setup Win2K and manually added RAID driver through device manager. Next, I moved the HD to the Promise IDE 1, created a mirror array, and duplicated the freshly configured drive. All is now well
note- BIOS configs are required as stated earlier in this thread- and the F6 trick during install wasn't helpful for me as the manufacturer didn't provide me with a floppy. Driver was updated from CD
Good input people
Good luck all
Silvafox

 

[Deglutition]

Hello,

First, excuse my broken english... ;-)

I have a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP motherbord with two IDE 60 Gigs Maxtor ATA 133 drive in RAID 0 (Promise PDC20276).

So, i installed Windows XP without problems (F6, insert the promise driver disk), etc.

I have reboot well many times without problem.

I have flash my bios with the new one (F10) and Windows XP won't reboot, tells me a corruption occured in %systemroot%\system

Boot on CD, made a repair (insert the drivers disk (F6)) and do only some dir on Windows XP console prompt.

Reboot and ok. It does it 3 times now.

What's wrong ???

Thanks for reply.

 

[Nietsdoen]

Februari 2003 I bought an Gigabyte 7VAXP motherboard with an Athlon2000XP and installed it with WindowsXP.
I already had 2 * 40GB IBM's (yes, the same, 1 of them has a bad power connection: it doens't always connect properly and therefore my Raid may crasch *&^%^&*).
I got several heavy problems:
- Page-fault-in-nopaged-areas
- Pnf-list-corrupt
- Bad-pool-caller
- Floating point and trap instruction
- Trap 00000D --- General protection fault
- Trap 00000D --- Exception.

Reading all the posts 1 see some other solutions:
1. "Trap execption" and "Floating point ..." indicate: Bad ram
2. Use the latest drivers. At first I used VIA 4in1 Hyperion 445, I have a feeling that the new 446 drivers (especially created for KT400 boards) is better.
3. "IRQ not less .." indicates IRQ conflict between AGP and Sound, might be created because of Raid drivers / Busmaster IDE drivers, so install Via 446.
4. "Page-fault ..." indicates Bad ram.

Two solutions seem to work until now:
1. My Zalman CNPS6000-AlCu cooler has an adjustable fan. I must speed it up fully to cool the Athlon under 45 degrees Celcius, above 48 Celsius the crashes begin. Strangely another computer with an Athlon1800XP on an MSI-6330-Raid (K7T 266) can function above 55 degrees ...
2. I connected a HP Officejet 635 with LPT1 and installed HP's WindowsXP software. Despite of what HP says (ignore XP's messages of incompatibility): after removing the printer and the software the system stays stable!!!!!
(Only system recovery sucks, I can't use it, it causes "Pnf-list-corrupt".