A7V333 Raid problem - no drives all of a sudden?

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pcrider

I've got an A7V333 Mother Board that I've been using for some time as
multimedia PC. I decided to upgrade the hard drives to a raid 0 or striped
aray for the speed about a year ago. It's been buggy sense then, but worked
ok, and it was faster than standard IDE.

Now I reboot this morning, and windows tells me it can't find drive C: .

So how did it get into windows? I don't know.

I try to reboot, and it shows no sign of a hard drive. The Promise
Fasttrack software says the array is functional, but the computer won't
boot from hard drive or from CD. I don't have a clue whats going on.

I tried reloading windows xp but it just hangs when it "checks your systems
hardware" so it doesn't even get started.

I tried using a western digital utility to check the drives (2-200 gig WD
drives), and the drives check ok.

I tried reinstalling the bios, made no difference.

I tried reloading the Fasttrack drivers, but I can't get it to boot to the
point where I can.

I went into Fasttrack setup, and deleted the array, then setup up a new
array, with no problem. This tells me the drives are ok also.

If the drives are ok, and Fasttrack is working how come the system doesn't
see the drives?

Help!!

I may be overlooking something, but I have checked the bios settings over
and over again, they are still set to ATA in PCI config, and boot ATA first
in boot section.

Any help much appreciated!!

Thanks in advance Mike B.
 
After re-building the array, the new PATA Raid-0, is probably without
format.
If that would be the case, you would be in the same position than attaching
a new HD to a mobo, without format: the system could not recongnize it,
because is on the attached to RAID controller.

I would just try each one of the HD -one by one- connected to normal IDE
channel, just to see on the POST if they are recognized and working
properly.
Once a possible fault of both HD's has been discarded, I would go back to
the Raid-0 configuration.

Also I would rather used any utility like Partition Magic, to arrange the
Raid-0 HD on the more convenient parts, BEFORE any attempt of SO
installation.

Don't forget to hace ready a floppy with the Raid unzipped drivers for the
installation at the time the screen ask you".... F6 for other SCSI or RAID
devices..."
 
After re-building the array, the new PATA Raid-0, is probably without
format.
If that would be the case, you would be in the same position than
attaching a new HD to a mobo, without format: the system could not
recongnize it, because is on the attached to RAID controller.

I would just try each one of the HD -one by one- connected to normal
IDE channel, just to see on the POST if they are recognized and
working properly.
Once a possible fault of both HD's has been discarded, I would go back
to the Raid-0 configuration.

Also I would rather used any utility like Partition Magic, to arrange
the Raid-0 HD on the more convenient parts, BEFORE any attempt of SO
installation.

Don't forget to hace ready a floppy with the Raid unzipped drivers for
the installation at the time the screen ask you".... F6 for other SCSI
or RAID devices..."
Click to expand...

It doesn't seem to see any drives at all. The only drive that it does
see is the floppy.
It won't boot windows from the CD. I set the board back to non-raid and
it won't boot even with an XP formatted hard drive on the IDE port.


Its really weird, bios sees, and reports the drives, but when I try to
boot up it ignores them, and makes me reboot before I can do anything at
all.
It boots to the screen that reports hardware, tells me I have the IDE
drive + the cd/DVD drives, then tells me "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT" No
matter what I do I get the reboot screen, or it just hangs, like I had
no drives at all.

pcrider
 
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