I have an ASUS A7N8X Dlx (2.0) motherboard. I have added a Highpoint 1540 SATA RAID controller to the system that I have running two 80 GB Maxtors and two 120 GB Western Digitals. I have set up the two 80 GB drives to be one striped drive using the RAID controller. I disabled the onboard SATA controller by the way because my SiSoft tests indicated that drives connected to the PCI connector were faster. Anyway, when I boot with the Windows XP CD I get a message the it can not format the drive. Anyone familiar with this. I am going to try to install XP on one of the non-RAID drives now and format the RAID drive and then install XP on it after that. If anyone has any suggestions though, please let me know.
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XP could not format my RAID-0 drive
- Thread starter djlenoir
- Start date
Update: Ok I am in Windows XP and the RAID-0 array is now the D: drive. I am using Disk Management to attempt to format the drive using 16k for allocation unit size (since I used this for the cluster size when creating the RAID array for performance reasons). I am getting a message that the format did not complete successfully. These drives are definitely NOT bad so that can be ruled out. However, I used to have these drives set up independently on the onboard SATA controller before removing the partitions and moving them to the new Highpoint PCI controller. Could that have anything to do with it? What should I try now... breaking the RAID array? Help, please!
Update: Ok well maybe it could be the drives... although I do not think they are bad. I think that they need a low level format or something. I think that maybe the MBR is messed up because I switched them from one SATA adapter to another. I am going to search the Maxtor website and see if I can find a utility to "fix" the drives. I am still open to suggestions though.
Don't know if it works in Raid but you can format the MBR alone.
I did it on a ATA drive not in an array,
You can download a win98 bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com. This has fdisk on it so just boot machine from it and run your fdisk /mbr
I did it on a ATA drive not in an array,
You can download a win98 bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com. This has fdisk on it so just boot machine from it and run your fdisk /mbr
Success! I ended up downloading MaxBlast from Maxtor and using the tools on that to basically low-level format the drives and rebuild the MBR. I was able to finally build as array (16k/16k) and I am loading up Windows XP on it as I type this. Thank God I have a laptop also! 