RE: Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure

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Hi Everyone,

Well... it appears that things are running normally again.

It's a long story; but, the biggest problem with the hard drive installation
issue has to do with me not understanding that there are two RAID controllers
on the Asus motherboard. When I read about the Promise controller when I
first started through the manual, I "assumed" that was the only RAID
controller, and that was the driver I attempted to install during the Win XP
setup. That's why XP setup never recognized the array.

I now know that I can configure RAID volumes through either the Intel
chipset, or the onboard Promise controller. I know which BIOS settings need
to be changed and which drivers to install during the XP setup routine.

I do have a question about the drives, though...

I initially set up a pair of identical SATA HDDs as RAID0 with the Promise
controller, and with the cabling correctly terminated. I thought I would
experiment and verify that I could set the drives up as RAID0 using the Intel
RAID controller. I changed the cabling, made changes to BIOS, made sure the
RAID array was configured properly, and restarted the XP setup. Setup
recognized the volume; however, when setup attempted to format the volume, it
hung.... I had to do a hard restart to exit setup.

I ended up removing the drives from the system and moving them to another
system where I made sure each HDD showed a single block of unallocated space.
(On one of the hard drives there was a volume that had to be deleted. Why one
and not the other?)

Other than not knowing what caused the original problem, I feel pretty
comfortable with where things stand. I've learned a lot....

Thanks again.

Jeff

"Jeff" wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I have done a little searching; but, I haven't seen anything relevant to my
problem. I hope the post is appropriate here.

My problem is that I started trying to determine why my Windows XP computer
would not boot normally. I was able to boot into Safe Mode with Networking
for about five days, and then I couldn't even boot into safe mode.

After some initial troubleshooting, I was helped by Daave on the Window XP
General forum. He provided a great outline for troubleshooting which began
with making sure there was not malware which had found its way into the
system. My problem at that point was that when booting up via two different
vendor's .iso files, I would get to a point where the hard drives were not
recognized.

As a point of reference, the hard drives were two identical drives set up as
a RAID0 configuration.

I can provide many more details of my troubleshooting plan; but, maybe it
will be easier if I give you the major results.

First, the system that I am trying to troubleshoot has an onboard Promoise
RAID controller.

As a point of reference, if I run the Win XP setup disk, I get to the Setup
screen which lists the drives which are available for installation. There are
four instances of Unknown Devices, and no volumes available for the
installation of XP.

I have made sure to load current RAID drivers during the XP Set routine. Yet
the RAID configuration is not identified.

If I go into the RAID setup utility which runs after POST, and I delete the
RAID0 volume, and then I go into BIOS and change the setting for SATA as RAID
from Yes to No, and reboot the system.... which spins up the Win XP setup
disk... I enter the setup routine again.

This time... I have two volumes available for the installation.

This leads me to believe that either the RAID controller on the motherboard
is bad, or the drivers are not up-to-date for the RAID controller during Win
XP setup. I know that I have the most current drivers from ASUS/Promise, so
I am reasonably certain that they are not the problem.

Does anyone think that I am on the right track?

Replacing the motherboard probabaly isn't a good option. Do you know if
there is a way to disable the RAID controller on the motherboard? Are there
RAID controllers mounted to aftermarket cards that I can run as a standalone
from the motherboard? (I will investigate those options today; but, I thought
you might know off the top of your head.)

I will probably just go ahead and install a larger hard drive in a non-RAID
configuration, and try to get things back up and running. The added speed of
the RAID0 configuration isn't really necessary now as this is more of a
back-up system.

I will always be a little suspect, though, fearing that other components on
the board may be close to failure.

The original thread that I was working through with Daave is
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/browse_thread/thread/e4f5f555b3121946/4795274e8331c587?hl=en&q

Thanks for any help that can be offered.

Jeff
.

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