XP wont boot from PCI Add-In RAID Card

[PulsaMatt]

Hopefully someone else has run into this before.

I have a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP motherboard that has been working flawlessly for years now. It has an onboard RAID card however the drivers are seriously flawed, so I disabled it and purchased a Promise FastTrak100 TX2 PCI RAID card. Popped it in and got Windows installed to the array I setup (RAID 1 2x80GB Drives). Windows installs all the system files in the "blue environment", then once it reboots I get this message:

Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
NTLDR: Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

Both drives in the array are known working and have checked all diagnostics. I even tried swapping them out for drives that were slated for another system, same issue after repeating the "blue environment" XP installation. So basically I never make it to the GUI environment.

I went in to the BIOS and removed booting from HDD-0 and replace it with SCSI (Promise's recommendation) ... so my entire boot order is 1) Floppy, 2) CDROM, 3) SCSI.

I read that it could potentially be an issue with IRQ sharing so I moved the PCI slot the RAID controller is in to its own IRQ, no help.

I have been into the recovery console several times to experiment with "bootcfg", "fixboot" and "fixmbr" ... nothing seems to help. I have deleted the partition and formatted it several times (using both quick format and full format).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I am at a total loss ... never run into this before. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have.

Matt Laski
Web & Systems Support
Pulsafeeder Inc.

 

[scottkosterow]

Matt,

I have seen this - on my dell demension PC. When i try to reinstall from my XP Pro disk. The way I fixed it is by hitting the F6 key, and installing the drivers for my SCSI card.

i would suggest going to the promiss web site:

http://www.promise.com/support/download/download2_eng.asp?category=all&os=100&productID=8

create the disk and vualla!

- Scott

 

[PulsaMatt]

Unfortunately I have done that ... tried using the Promise drivers on the disk they provided me with the card ... then tried using the drivers on the website ... both led to this result :-(

Matt Laski
Web & Systems Support
Pulsafeeder Inc.

 

[linney]

HOW TO SET UP A RAID ARRAY

http://www.pctechguide.com/tutorials/RAID.htm

0

 

[undrcovr]

That error means it cant see the system partition which loads boot files. How are you setting up the partition(s)?

 

[PulsaMatt]

I gave up ... I've built tons of RAID arrays in most every configuration and never had this trouble before. Unfortunately I just dont have the time or money to really investigate the problem fully.

My motherboard is over three years old and while this is the first time its done anything like this, it is reaching its limits of usefulness. Its flaws are becoming more apparent as Gigabyte admits more known issues my revision level and connections to the southbridge (including the onboard RAID controller).

After spending 3 days on it I've scrapped the plans, I'll be returning the RAID card and just working with what I have until I can replace the entire computer later this year ... I'll come up with alternative means of data-security ... won't be as ideal as having a RAID 1 array like I wanted, but I'll make something work.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Matt Laski
Web & Systems Support
Pulsafeeder Inc.