Add drives to controller, Windows won't boot???

[rottweiler]

Ok, I've posted a few problems I've been having with setting up my hard drives.
But this is getting ridiculous.
Ok, I finally got my drives installed the way I wanted.
My Raptor 74gb as a single drive with the OS as C, and my 3x 200gb Seagate drives in Raid 5 for backup and storage as E.
The reason I put it as E was because I wanted to add 2x 36gb raptors in Raid 0 as D.
To get the 74gb raptor and the Raid 5 to their respective letters I had to boot into windows setup with the 74gb Raptor with a partition created, the Raid 5 without a partition and only 1 cdrom drive.
In windows setup, the raptor was recognized as C, and the CDrom as D.
Then when I created a partition on the Raid 5, it labeled it E.
I needed to create the partition on the Raid 5 because windows said it needed to install files on it for setup.
Then after everything was the way I liked it, I decided to add my 2x 36gb raptors.
I put them in and set them up in the controller bios.
Then after my 4 bios screens my system looked for a bootable drive, and didn't find one.
This happened before when I installed windows only on the raptor and then connected the Raid 5.
For whatever reason, I didn't think this would be a problem.
So I deleted the 2x 36gb raptor array, and booted into windows.
Installed the 3ware software, and then created the new array in windows.
When I restarted, no NTLDR found.

What the heck is going on?
Why can't I add drives to my controller without restarting?
This is really bugging me.
Please, if anyone has any answers, please tell me, I'll probably be calling 3ware tonight.
Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks

 

[Tigerbiten]

I would go into your bios and check your boot load order when you add drives.
It sounds like the raid drives are put in the boot order ahead of your old drives.

The other thing to check is that your C: drive is on the first SATA channel.
If it on a pci card then make sure that the card is set to boot before the motherboard SATA.
Etc, etc.

Luck........

 

[rottweiler]

well, there are no drives on my onboard sata controller, so that should be ok, right/
And for the boot load order, do you mean the controllers bios?
I don't remember seeing anythign about boot order, which I thought was weird, but I'll check again.
I'm not sure what channel anythings on exactly because I just moved them all around, but it was doing the same thing when the boot was 4, and the other 3 were 5,6 and 7.
I'll make sure the boot is 1 tonight.

Thanks for the quick reply.

 

[Tigerbiten]

I've got a mix of SCSI & SATA drives just for fun.
As I boot off a SCSI drive I have to make sure my SCSI card is set before my SATA device in the bios.
If your adding devices then check where they get added to the boot order.
The other thing to check is that the check for other boot devices is set to enable in the bios.

Plus as you are useing Windozes XP the only drive letter you cannot change is you system drive.
So if you have your OS set as C: then all the other drives are changeable.

Luck.........

 

[rottweiler]

Plus as you are useing Windozes XP the only drive letter you cannot change is you system drive.
So if you have your OS set as C: then all the other drives are changeable.

Well, not exactly.
I thought this also, but any drive windows uses during installation you cannot change the drive letter of.
And as I said when I installed windows it said it needed to use my Raid 5 for files during installation, so I cannot change it's drive letter or my boot drive.
I don't know why it had to use it, but if I disconnected it and then installed it would work, but then when I reconnected the drives, it gave me the missing NTLDR error.
So I think if I reinstalled, I'd get a similar problem and not be able to change drive letters of any of my 3 drives.
Hopefully I can find a way around this as I don't even want to reinstall again.

 

[Tigerbiten]

It sounds like your booting from your raid5 drives and its passing you onto your SATA drive to load your OS.
Make your system files visable and find which drive has your NTLDR file on it.
That drive is your boot drive even if its not your C: drive.
Did you load your SATA drivers from floppy by hitting F6 durring the start of Windozes setup.
If not then thats why Windozes needs the raid5 drives to load its boot files into.

Luck..........

 

[rottweiler]

interesting
the ntldr is on E, my raid 5.

However, all my drives are on the same controller so that's not why it needed the raid 5 to install.
And that still doesn't explain why I can't add drives.
It does look as though my 74gb Raptor is on port 1, although I think port 0 is the first port.
And they were different when I installed windows.

My 2 36gb raptors are on ports 6 and 7, and they were added after windows was installed.
So the question still remains, why when I create a raid 0 with my 2 36gb raptors can't windows find my ntldr?

This is frustrating.

 

[rottweiler]

Does anyone else have an idea of how to fix this?
I haven't had time to troubleshoot much yet, but so far I know that the NTLDR is on my Raid 5 array.
And if I try to add my 2x 36gb drives in raid 0 windows says it can't find the NTLDR.
This happens if I set up the array in Windows or the controller bios.

Even if anyone has sucessfully added another array to a 3ware 9500S -8 card, I'd like to know.
It'd be nice to know if it's just me, my card, or some strange freak problem.

Thanks

 

[Tigerbiten]

Ok.
Some more ideas.
Find which drive has your boot.ini file on it.
If it is your E: drive then that is your boot drive.

One idea to try is do a full reinstal of Windozes on your 74 Gig drive.
Removeall o0ther drives before you start.
Partion it to give you about a 10 gig OS partion and then use the rest for an other aplication partion.
This will give Windozes room for its temp files.
Once thats up and running then add the other arrays.

Hopefully as you will now be booting off your C: drive not your E: drive your problems will be sovled.

Luck..........

 

[Tigerbiten]

Thinking about it a better option would be just add all your drives in the arrays you want.
Then just reinstall Windozes over the top of your of your existing copy of windows.
That way it will put your boot files where it wants to and you will be in less danger of looseing data.
The only disadvantage of doing that is you may have to redo that if you add more drives.

Luck........

 

[rottweiler]

Finally, all is fixed.
As always in computers it came down to something stupid, but luckily, not exactly on my end this time.
The manual and common sense says that the first set of drives will be bootable.
However, my card makes the last set bootable.
After everything I had seen, I decided to try moving my 74gb Raptor to the bottom of the list, and it worked.
I reinstalled windows, renamed the Raid 5 from D to E, and set up the raid 0 as D.
I don't exactly understand why windows recognized my last partition as C and not D, but I'll take it.
Maybe because of the order the drives are in on the controller as my 74gb is on port 0.

Right now I'm using the whole 74gb for windows and games.
I'm not really partitioning it yet, although I should.
But I'm gonna back it up, probably weekly, to the Raid 5.
Any idea of some good software for this, is windows backup ok?
Free would be better, but I'm willing to pay some for a decent backup software if needed.

Thanks a lot for the help, even if it was 3ware's fault in the end.
It's sad that I previously thought that an 8 port card would be plenty, and now I'm worried that I only have 2 more free ports.
Although I do still have 2 on my motherboard.
Raid 0 can't take advantage of the controllers XOR processor right?
So if I moved them to the motherboard controller, would there be much performance difference?
I guess I'll do some testing sometime and see for myself.
Although I've heard bad things about Sandra and HDTach, so what's a good benchmark utility?

Thanks again