EP-9NDA3+ SATA Raid Boot problem.

[Sniper_Merc]

Ok, this is kind of a freaky problem that I ran into once before with this board, the owner recently reset the bios and it reared its fugly head again, and I'll be damned if I can figure out how to get around it again.

Epox EP-9NDA3+
Athlon 64 3500+
1 GB Corsair PC 4000
2x WD Raptor 36 GB drives in ports 1/2 (nvraid instead of the marvell) system drive
1x cd burner IDE
1x dvd burer IDE
2x WD 160 GB drives (non raid) on IDE

After resetting the bios and reinstalling windows, if he doesn't have a bootable CD rom such as the XP CD in one of the optical drives, the system will come up with a BOOT DISK FAILURE. message, now this happens even though the CD/DVD drives are not even in the boot sequence, IE 1st boot device is set to hard drive, with all other boot devices disabled, it will still look for a bootable CD first and then go to the raided raptors, if no bootable CD is in the optical drives then the BOOT DISK FAILURE message pops up.

When I setup the system back in febuary I believe it had something to do with putting the floppy drive in the boot sequence to delay the bios detection of the raided raptors, but I don't recall exactly what I did to get around the problem.

Only reason I don't go over to his place to fix it is he lives 30 miles away now so trying to do it from a distance.

TIA for any help

 

[Sniper_Merc]

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/showthread.php?p=341314#post341314

After experiencing this problem myself, and seeing lots of people on forums who have it and who also didn't find a solution: here it is.
I experienced the same problem while installing my mobo (asus a8n-sli with dual SATA raptors and three ide drives attached).
The problem stems from the windows installation. Windows will install perfectly when you supply it with the SATA drivers, BUT due to a bug, it places the necessary bootfiles not on your SATA drives, but on your first IDE drive (generally the master drive of IDE channel 1).

The solution to not need a windows xp bootcdrom while booting, is in this case:
After you installed windows on your SATA disks, boot from windows install cd into the installer program, AFTER DISCONNECTING ALL IDE DRIVES. Supply windows (hit F6 when asked) with the SATA drivers. Go into Recovery Console.
copy ntdetect.com and ntldr from your cdrom (in directory i386) to your SATA disk. If necessary make them system and hidden again (attrib +hs ntldr and attrib +hs ntdetect.com)
Then do fixboot (command available in recovery console) and (i don't know if this step is necessary) fixmbr (when you execute these commands make sure you are in the root of your SATA disk).

Now all that remains is to generate a correct boot.ini file (if there is already one on your SATA disk, delete it (you might need attrib again to change file characteristics).
bootcfg /rebuild

this will give something like:
Total Identified Windows Installs: 1

[1] C:\Windows
Add installation to boot list? (Yes/No/All):
Enter Load Identifier: (Custom description for an operating system loading from the Boot menu) : Windows XP Pro
Enter Operating System Load Options: /fastdetect

if you did all this, you now have a good-to-go bootable SATA disk. Turn off your pc, & remove your windows cd. Reboot and it should be booting from the SATA disk (make sure in your bios it is set to boot from the SATA disk).
You can then reconnect your IDE drives and the problem will be solved.

Hope this helps out...

Using the above method didn't quite work however it did make me realize that when I setup the system back in febuary that I had installed the raptors in RAID 0 before I had installed any of the IDE hard drives.

The problem with the method above was that when we tried the fixboot command it came back with an error saying invalid disk, note that fixmbr worked but not fixboot, nothing we tried could get around it so we reinstalled XP without the IDE drives hooked up and it worked perfectly.

Thanks for all the help, this was a goofy one to try and figure out but now we know for the next time