IDE RAID and XP

[Gidish]

I have installed the raid controller and have the 2 hard drives plugged into the appropriate ide riad slot (DFI AD77 Infinity). Now when i go to install windows XP i get a message that it doesn't detect any hard drives and XP will not install. The manual i have is terrible and doesn't explain anything. I followed the directions and i see that the raid driver is installed. i can even start the raid bios, so i know the bios sees the drives. windows just cant see them to install the OS. any suggestions?

[Max_M_25]

If my memory is right.... Once the WinXP installation CD start, one of the first thing you will see at the bottom of the blue install screen is something like "press F6 to install third party raid driver"... Just do it and follow the instrucions. You will probably be asked to insert your floppy containing the raid driver.

[Gidish]

That is correct. Press f6 ti install a third party scsi or raid drivers. I went through that and have successfully installed them, but when windows conitnues to setup afterwards i get a message telling me that windows does not detect any hard drives, and it won;t continue the install. any ideas on why windows wont see the drives?

[Gidish]

OK, went through it all again with the f6 setup and all. Now i got a blue screen error.
driver_irql_not_less_or_equal
0x000000D1 (0x9c020000, 0x00000011, 0x00000001, 0x8673400c)

Any help?

[Max_M_25]

HUm ok... I only instaled a raid setup and XP once, and it was 7 months ago. I remember that my HDD would not be recognised, If my memory is right, it had something to do with some settings in the BIOS ( something like where to boot from). But that was a while ago.

And for the Blue Screen... Never seen that during installation. Can you dowmload updated drivers for your Raid Card? Maybe the one you have is not fully compatible with XP....

Hopefully someone with more experience with RAID will jump in and find a way for you to install Windows!

[hama]

Which IDE raid are you using? Download the latest drivers from the website and copy the driver to a floppy. Install the driver after you have entered F6 when installing windows XP. I have to do that with the onboard highpoint ide raid.

[redheads]

First thing you have to do is go to the raid contr bios and assign your raid array.

The during install hold F6 to install the raid drivers rest should be no problem.

[TomG]

arrrghh, not IDE RAID again! I had sooo many problems with RAID and XP a while ago now, I bought an ATA133 RAID controller for my K7S5A and had endless problems with reliability, in my opinion its not worth the risk, I use the card to control optical drives now! Don't trust it with my hard drives.

[chemmajik]

driver_irql_not_less_or_equal can be also caused by a bad bank of memory or overclocked to high lower the SPD to a lower setting or lower the fsb can help, reseat the memory, give it more juice is about the best thing to solve it...

This is all after trying the lates drivers of course for the raid card like was suggested.

[Gidish]

Thanks. I ended up installing XP because i needed to get it up and running. i tried installing the raid driver from the device manager and went to reboot and it started deleting files upon reboot and then i could't boot up because files were missing. so i did a reinstall of xp (repair couldnt fix). i did get the array setup in the raid bios and it did create the mirrored drive. but once in windows nothing gets written to the mirrored disk due tp the drivers not being loaded. I am gonna try it again and cross my fingers. the highpoint tech department has been terrible with support.
oh yeah, do the disks have to be dynamic for an onboard raid to work? i didnt think so, but i went ahead and made them dynamic since it didn't work when they were basic. also shouldn't i be able to convert the dynamic back to basic?