Problems with RAID & Vista/XP dual-boot

I

Instynx

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 18, 2008
Messages
106
I have XP Pro installed on a single partition of a hard drive, and when I installed Vista Home Premium 64 bit I decided to do it on a RAID 0 array. I have an XFX nForce 680i SLI motherboard which has built-in RAID capabilities, so that is what I'm using. When I did the install I first went into the BIOS and set up the RAID array using twin 80 GB Western Digital Caviar HDDs. Everything was fine with the setup and Vista installed without a hickup. After spending a few hours installing games and updating drivers and such, which included upgrading to NVIDIAs own storage and RAID drivers, I decided to restart and go back into my XP OS. When it opened up it said it found the new "NVIDIA Stripe" RAID system and wanted to install drivers for it. I just hit cancel because I didn't think XP really needed to worry about that anyways. Well, when I attempted to go back to Vista it wouldn't boot. Turns out the motherboard had disabled the RAID setup so Vista could not be found. After I went in and re-enabled the RAID for the hard drives it booted up just fine. Does anybody know why my RAID would have gotten disabled and do you know how to keep it enabled? Is it something to do with not installing the right drivers in XP? I'm really confused and I'm going to get really mad if I have to keep going into the BIOS everytime I want to switch Operating Systems.
 
Im sure someone with more knowledge will chime in on software RAID. I use hardware RAID and I recall at bootup I could sort of dual boot if you call it that. I could use my old hard drive with Windows vista on it or use my Raid controller to boot into a newer vista install.

The mobo gave me a option of chosing which to boot first. f6 or something to that tune.
 
I guess my biggest concern right now is, What should I do when I log into XP next time and it does its "found new hardware" thing? What drivers/software should I tell it to look for?
 
sorry to thread crap but just wondering, why the dualboot? Vista has XP compatibility mode which barely needs use at all and if youre doing this for gaming performance then FYI after SP1, Vista has higher average FPS than XP

if its something else then alright but just throwing this out there in case you didnt know
 
Just didn't want to deal with backups, transfers, etc... As I slowly transfer all my settings and such I may end up getting rid of XP, but for now I wanted to keep it, Just in case.
 
If you enabled RAID in the BIOS to use on Vista, when you boot into XP, its going to see the newly enabled RAID options, so youd need to install drivers for it.
 
Pop your vista disk in and hit 'repair' before the install and let it do it's thang!

Vista is unbelivably forgiving, I was moving my bootman about drives the other day just casually deleting it from my storage drives before sorting mobo priority and letting vista do it's thing.
 
FIXED IT!!! Darn you NVIDIA for making BIOS access so easy in nTune that it can even screw things up when you don't even realize it. Turns out nTune still had RAID disabled, so once it loaded up when Windows started it would disable the RAID automatically. Set it up to enable the RAID and voila! A perfect dual-boot setup.
 
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