Trouble with hardware RAID 0

[}Meat_Whistle{]

I have an issue with installing a hardware RAID 0. This is not a new build, but a system that has been working for 2 years. I removed the old drive and installed 2 250gb western digital hdd on a Manhattan PCI IDE RAID controller. I have them on primary channel, set up as master/slave.

On the initial boot of this setup, the system recognises the card and has me press F3 to set up the RAID configuration. That goes well, and then the system boots from CD to install windows. I press F6 to install the driver, which it finds and seems to accept. It then formats my drive and loads installation files. The driver is either the first or one of the first files it loads. At the end of this process, it reboots to continue installing windows.

This is where the problem comes in. It never finds the RAID array to boot from. It will POST, then I see the RAID information, then a black screen and about a miniute later it reboots again. This is a continuous loop if I let it go. I've tried all boot from configurations my motherboard supports, including 'boot other device'. No luck. I know that the drives are available because in going to recovery console and using bootcfg it says C: NTFS 485 (or so) GB.

Is there any way to force boot from a particular device such as my PCI card? The manual that came with the controller says to set boot to SCSI when windows finishes loading but I never get there. I know that there is a BIOS update for my motherboard but it says it provides support for AMD Sempron processors and that's it.

System Specs:
Soltek SL-75FRN2 main board BIOS D1.9
Athlon XP 3200+ processor
1GB RAM
2 DVD drives
Radeon X800GTO video

FWIW, I can remove the controller and reinstall my old drive and I'm back to where I was before so I think any other hardware problems can be ruled out. I'm about to write it off as hardware incompatibility and just mirror it through windows but I thought I'd see what you guys had to say. I would sure like to get this working as RAID 0 though.

 

[drizzt81]

look for boot order n the bios.

also, you are most likely not running a hardware raid controller. And I would split the two drive between primary and secondary channel for improved performance.

 

[}Meat_Whistle{]

I've tried every combination possible in BIOS for order, none of them work. I will split them between primary and secondary though. It still dosen't solve the issue of it not booting to the array though.

Why wouldn't this be hardware RAID?

 

[Team Obi Juan]

Look for "Bootable add-in device". That option should be near the actual boot order. Once you say enabled on that add in device, another option in the boot order should appear and you'd select that.

Try that.

 

[drizzt81]

Why wouldn't this be hardware RAID?

the "most likely" is derived from this:

• I have never heard of Manhattan. Many hardware RAID manufacturer's names are familiar to me
• The image on their site shows a card with a single chip, no heatsink, no RAM slot. Most hardware RAID cards are multi-chip solutions, require a heatsink, have a RAM slot or onboard RAM or a combination thereof.
• Lack of RAID-5 support, which most hardware controllers are used for
• low price tag of $50 for a new product

all these combined lead me to believe that it's what I would call "firmware" raid, i.e. a chip and a driver that work together to make multiple drives appear like one to the OS.

ps.: I am sorry that I cannot offer any other suggestions besides what has already been mentioned.