Nvidia IDE RAID: XP = fine, Vista = Two drives!

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Flapjack

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I'm going mad here. I cannot figure out why this is happening. I finally gave in and upgraded to Vista, mostly for DX10 games. Now, I cannot see my 400GB RAID0 IDE stripe.

The drives are both 200GB Maxtor 6L200R0 (ATA133) and the mainboard is an Epox EP-9NPAJ-SLI with an nForce 4 chipset.

I've installed the latest nForce 4 drivers for Vista x64, but the controller shows up as a "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller".

On top of this, ever since I wiped XP and put Vista, I keep hearing a hard drive click and spin down every few minutes. I hope this is some powersaving shit, which I'm about to disable.

As for the RAID array showing up as two drives, what do I do? The NV RAID BIOS shows it as a healthy 400GB array during bootup. But once I get to windows, there is one initialized drive and one that says it needs to be initialized.

Please help!
 
did you install the raid drivers when you installed vista you should have seen a button that said install drivers?
 
Vista does not support NVRAID on the nForce 4. I've looked into this for one of my motherboards, there are no drivers.
 
@AMD_Gamer
I read somewhere that there are some M$ drivers, but I never got the bubble, nor could I find any in the OS itself.

@thebeephana
That's what I was afraid of. This is bullshit.
 
Yea, I have an EVGA mobo with the NF4 SLI 16x chipset or whatever the heck it is, it has a nice raid that can combine 4x sata and 4x ide drives, I was going to use it with all my old HDDs for a BT server but I was going to try to use the Windows Home Server but not use home servers software raid or whatever it uses. I was going to do a RAID5 with a bunch of 120GB HDDs.
 
Well, this pisses me off. I guess I could always load up a vmware installation of XP and extra what I need from that array. There are some vids of my kids on there that I'd really like to keep.
 
Vmware was no help. It only allows limited access to hardware. I was hoping I could see the hard drives in an XP session, restore the array, and pull the stuff I needed off. Guess not.

Now, I need to make a backup image of Vista, reinstall XP, get the crap I need, then restore the image of Vista.

I can't believe no one has found a way to make IDE RAID work on Vista...
 
i was able to get sata nvraid working with a boot disk before windows. let me see if i can find it and see if it works for ide.


*edit found it.

here are the instructions

Burn the ISO to a CD.
configure your computer to boot from DVD drive.
Insert the CD in the DVD drive, boot.
When prompted, remove the CD, insert Vista DVD and press a key.
The computer will boot vista setup from DVD with legacy SATA support.
!!!! When setup reboots the PC for the first time, you need to use the trick again, or you will get a BSOD :
Remove Vista DVD and insert the CD.
Boot
When prompted, remove the CD and press a key.
Vista will boot from hard drive and setup continues.

HERE is the boot cd.
 
I need the IDE RAID to work... not SATA RAID.

codegrinder said:
i was able to get sata nvraid working with a boot disk before windows. let me see if i can find it and see if it works for ide.


*edit found it.

here are the instructions

Burn the ISO to a CD.
configure your computer to boot from DVD drive.
Insert the CD in the DVD drive, boot.
When prompted, remove the CD, insert Vista DVD and press a key.
The computer will boot vista setup from DVD with legacy SATA support.
!!!! When setup reboots the PC for the first time, you need to use the trick again, or you will get a BSOD :
Remove Vista DVD and insert the CD.
Boot
When prompted, remove the CD and press a key.
Vista will boot from hard drive and setup continues.

HERE is the boot cd.
Click to expand...
 
Gave up. Reloaded XP. Began a whole new adventure.

For one, it saw my usual system drive as the D: for some reason. Man, I hate when that happens. On top of that, the damn setup routine did a chkdsk that I couldn't get out of.

So it sat there for an hour doing it's orphaned file thing, then finally got to the desktop.

The two 200gb drives were there, but one showed up as a 400gb one, and the other was a 200gb that wasn't initialized. On top of that, the label was "FTP", which was what it was before the last time I wiped it. The file structure was even there, and seemed mostly intact.

I loaded the legacy nvraid drivers, and after a few reboots, the drive was back with the new label and file structure. I haven't checked if anything has been scrambled or not.... that'll have to wait for tomorrow.
 
the board i was using had ide raid and sata raid all handled by nf4 so i figured it would work.
 
It very well might be. I just looked in Device Manager, and there are two controllers:

NVIDIA nForce4 Parallel ATA Controller
NVIDIA nForce4 Serial ATA Controller

Then, under "SCSI and RAID controllers", there is:

NVIDIA nForce RAID Class Controller.

I was under the impression there were two separate controllers on the motherboard. I'm probably wrong, though.

I'm going to get what I can off the array, then reinstall Vista. This time, I'm going with 32-bit. I had fits trying to get 64-bit to accept non-signed drivers. I had to uninstall 5 different KB patches just to let disabling the signed checking to work via command prompt. I want no more of that....
 
Oh yeah, another problem I'm having... since installing Vista 64-bit, I've had to keep the Windows disc in the drive, or I'll get the "INVALID BOOT DISC" message. After wiping Vista and reinstalling XP, the problem persisted.

I think I'm going to have to unplug every drive except for the drive I'm going to install Windows on, then plug the others back in afterwards. Geez....
 
The boot disc didn't seem to do anything. I booted with it, and it said "remove disk and press any key". Once I did, I'd get the "INVALID BOOT DISC" thing. That may be part of the problem I've had all along....
 
change your boot order as well, make sure the drive that your installing your os on is first in the list, sounds like windows put mbr on one of the raid drives instead.
 
codegrinder said:
change your boot order as well, make sure the drive that your installing your os on is first in the list, sounds like windows put mbr on one of the raid drives instead.
Click to expand...

The boot order has always been fine. I have no idea what caused that goof up. I just unplugged every other drive, and ran setup.

As for getting RAID to work, like I said, the boot disc didn't work for me. However, I was able to get the IDE RAID working. First, I installed Vista Ultimate x86 and the nForce4 Vista 32 drivers. Then, I took the WinXP drivers for the nForce4 controller and extracted them instead of running the installer (which would've failed because it was for WinXP). Under IDE, there is a "legacy" folder (regular IDE), and under that there is a raid driver. So I changed the drivers of the "Parallel ATA Controller" to the "legacy" drivers listed after a few reboots, my RAID0 array appeared again!

Thanks for all the help on this. What a PITA....
 
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