Raid 0 and drive letters mess-up?

[poster]

Hi,

I have a mboard with Sis Raid controller and installed Xp pro on 2 identical
hdisks (as raid 0) which XP recognizes as one hd. I also have another IDE hd
and 3 cd-dvd drives. In all, A: (floppy), C, D, E, F, and G. Sometimes also
H and J. (virtual image drives). On my 1st install, the main boot drive
(raid) was assigned as G: and all was fine, although some applications
insisted on considering C: as the main drive. For some reason I replaced the
C: hd at some point . And XP wouldn't boot anymore, errors of the type
'System disk boot failure' or 'NDR letter missing' or similar. I tried
booting and fixing with 'rescue' cd's, repair installation with the xp cd
but the raid partition was not recognized as vaild. I had to re-install
everything. And now, the raid boot hd is assigned as D. The IDE drive always
gets C:, although xp is not installed there. I had to remove C: again, and
the mess is back. Is there a way around this?

Thank for reading this...

 

[DL]

If you wish to start again, connect your two raid hd's and a single cd,
disconnect all other hd's/cd's
Boot with winxp cd partition/format/install etc using F6 option to install
raid drivers from floppy.
On reboot, OK, build the array.
NB depending on your mobo you may have to reset the bios boot order, in
order to designate Raid/sata
On completion, shutdown install other hd's re boot
You may wish to partition/format your other hd's
Shutdown, connect other cd's, reboot
Insure you install mobo chipset drivers and hw drivers from supplied cd's or
hw manu.sites only. NOT winupdate.

PS You are aware raid 0 has no fault tolerance?, one disk fails you lose
all.

 

[kurttrail]

Hi,

I have a mboard with Sis Raid controller and installed Xp pro on 2
identical hdisks (as raid 0) which XP recognizes as one hd. I also
have another IDE hd and 3 cd-dvd drives. In all, A: (floppy), C, D,
E, F, and G. Sometimes also H and J. (virtual image drives). On my
1st install, the main boot drive (raid) was assigned as G: and all
was fine, although some applications insisted on considering C: as
the main drive. For some reason I replaced the C: hd at some point .
And XP wouldn't boot anymore, errors of the type 'System disk boot
failure' or 'NDR letter missing' or similar. I tried booting and
fixing with 'rescue' cd's, repair installation with the xp cd but the
raid partition was not recognized as vaild. I had to re-install
everything. And now, the raid boot hd is assigned as D. The IDE drive
always gets C:, although xp is not installed there. I had to remove
C: again, and the mess is back. Is there a way around this?
Thank for reading this...

Before reinstalling, disconnect the 3rd non-RAID IDE. When doing the
install, the first RAID partition should be seen as the C: drive.

--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
microscum.pubic.windowsexp.gonorrhea
http://microscum.com/mscommunity
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
"Produkt-Aktivierung macht frei"

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

It occurs because the IDE drive is being designated as the active (system)
volume, and is the one the system starts from, regardless of where the WinXP
files are installed. The bootstrap is pointing to it, and the setup routine
is placing the boot files (ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini) here. Once
they run, they point to the XP system files (the boot volume), which then
takes over startup.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org