Install to RAID fails halfway

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I am setting up a new PC on a GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard, with the AMD 780G chipset. It includes SATA RAID support with lots of ports. I am using two identical 500GB drives to make a RAID0 set, and I am installing XP Pro to a partition of that set. I have successfully configured the RAID set in BIOS.

The XP installation goes as expected to a point: Boot from CD, press F6 and wait, load drivers from the floppy*, partition the (recognized) 1TB hard drive, copy a lot of system files. Then it goes back to the floppy to copy the drivers over...

"setup cannot copy the file ahcix86.inf". Retry no good. Only ESC to skip the file moves on. Repeat for ahcix86.sys and ahcix86.cat. Then the doomed install resumes copying system files, and then reboots to do the GUI stuff but instead goes bluescreen error 7b (after the brief Windows splash screen).

In order for the RAID set to hold the operating system, I have to deal with this first. I need to get those drivers into the right system folder, it seems. I tried F8 to get to safe mode, but I still get the bluescreen code 7b. I need a DOS prompt with RAID driver support, or I need to do surgery on the WinXPU CD to put the drivers there, perhaps.

My best guess so far is that there are drivers by the same name already there, and they are marked read-only, and Windows install can't deal with over-writing them. I have tested both hard drives and the RAM. A trial install to a single drive was successful, other things being the same.

TIA for all attempts to educate me.

*Install warns that Windows already has an older driver for "AMD AHCI RAID controller x86", and I choose to use the one from the floppy. When I tried using the old one, it didn't see the RAID set.
 
http://74.55.96.66/vb/all/windows/t-33616-Windows-XP-Pro-SP2-error-with-SATA--RAID-drives.html

Zenzin09-21-2005, 03:02 PM
Hi there,

here are my system specs:

Asus P5LD2 Mobo
P4 3.2Ghz 2MB
2x WD 80GB SATA HDDs
2GB DDR2 RAM


I am trying to setup the two identical HDDs as a raid set and windows is having problems with it.

I have done the following in order:
- Set the IDE config to RAID in BIOS
- Setup a RAID array using the two HDDs which seems to be working fine.
- Restart the comp and begin installing windows
- Press F6 to use the asus RAID drivers
- Drivers install fine and windows continues to load it's files
- The message "windows is starting" pops up and then I get a STOP error which freezes my comp

Here is the STOP error:

STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78D2524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I looked the error up on the MS website and reached the conclusion that windows isn't liking my HDDs for some reason.
I have tried only using one of the HDDs in case one is broken with no success.

I have tried using the latest RAID driver from the ASUS website.. no luck.
I have updated the BIOS with the latest files.. no luck.
I have even tried only using one of the RAM chips in case it was those, no luck.

Its the same error EVERY TIME.. i've been at this for a good two days.. nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

edfam10-06-2005, 07:33 AM
I had the same issue for the past two weeks and finally resolved it last night. I tried everything from the SATA II drives to memory incompatibilities and eventually it came down to my CD / DVD drives and the way that ASUS motherboards deal with onboard IDE's.

On my Asus P5WD2, which is very similar to yours, I have three onboard IDE's. Two of them are grouped together and one is sort of on its own on the side of the motherboard. Make sure that the optical drives (CD and DVD) are plugged into the side IDE and not the two that are grouped together.

Secondly make sure that you use the IDE cable with the blue, black and grey connector and not any of the other cables. Also remember to set the one drive as master and the other as slave and plug the grey connector into the master and the black connector into the slave and the blue one into the motherboard.

The problem comes from the fact that Windows or Linux (I've tried both) is seeing the optical drives as hard drives and therefore is not able to start up properly.

antone3x710-07-2005, 12:40 AM
Whoa, thank you SO VERY MUCH edfam!!!

I've had my P5LD2 Deluxe for about a week now and I've been running into the same situation. I've googled "P5LD2 0x0000007B" several times over the past week and found many other people having this same problem, yet their solutions never solved my problem. I did my same google search 5 minutes ago and found this thread, gave your solution a try and BAM, it finally works!

Awesome man, thanks a bunch!

Yeah I've been doing a little hair pulling and head scratching over this problem for the past couple days. Kept on getting that 0x7b BSOD error as well on the same motherboard. Used partition magic bootable floppies to actually wipe out all the existing data on the entire drive and then formatted them numerous times to try to get rid of that error.

Simply by switching the cd/dvd drive to the side ide connector like you mentioned is now allowing me to install xp on my new machine as I'm typing this on my crappy oldie (733 Mhz ugh). That damn manual should be more explicit about stuff like this. I thought it said you can plug in ATAPI/CD devices on primary or secondary ide connectors.

Also don't like the position of the CMOS pins are. It's hard to clear it and have to use needle nose plyers (sp?) to do it cuz I have an IDE drive connected to the Primary IDE connector. But this should be for a different thread I guess.

Again many thanks for the quick and easy solution to the BSOD problem upon windows xp install. If I had read this thread earlier I might have been able to simply do a repair install and not have to install all my apps again. But I'm just happy that I got past the damn problem.

:giddy:
-pogdish

Not sure if this will apply to you. However, it's a start. Let us know if this resolves your issue.
 
My problem is happening before that, and there's only one IDE socket anyway. I wil double-check the master/slave settings. It's a copy from the floppy to the SATA RAID pair that's problematic, even after both read and write operations worked (loading the driver from floppy, and copying from CD to RAID).
I'll report back, but I am quite sure I need another answer. Any notions for getting the drivers on there, short of slipstreaming?
 
I didn't get a chance to thoroughly read through this thread (I'm pretty busy here at work but I'm scanning the forums when I can) but I would certainly try to add those drivers into your WinXP CD using nLite. I'd just make sure I had the correct and most up to date drivers when I merged them in. If you have a complete install to one drive or another machine to try it on give it a shot.
 
Yeah, and I tried it again to be sure. Just retried install to a single SATA drive configured as AHCI, same result. I can think of two things to try now as workarounds:
1. Slipstream onto the Windows install disk
2. Install to a single drive configured as "native IDE" in BIOS, install drivers through windows, copy partition image to the RAID set

Obviously I'd still like an idea how to make it work as it should, not just workarounds.
 
I can't believe how easy it was to slipstream the drivers. Download drivers, insert DVD, click two buttons, make the ISO, burn the disk. I don't think anything significant was lost in translation, because it worked right away, both for a single AHCI drive and a RAID0 pair, with no other worries.

In retrospect, apparently it is something truly silly, like the AHCI driver files get installed read-only.

Thanks to all who replied.
 
Hello...

Would someone be able to help me? I thought I had succesfully slipstreamed the raid drivers into my XP install (through nlite)... but I am still getting an error when installing XP. (missing file ahcix86.sys). I am guessing that I did not do everything in nlite.

Steps I have taken:
1) Download drivers from Gigabyte
2) Run the self-extractor, and save the files on my desktop
3) Install nlite
4) Copy XP into a folder on my desktop
5) Run nlite, and only try to include drivers for RAID... (see step 2)
6) Inside of nlite, I am including both AHCIX64.INF & AHCIX86.INF
7) Create & Burn ISO...
8) Insert CD into new PC.. (Specs are in my profile)
9) Turn on boot new PC, and get the error of missing file, once windows setup begins..

Thanks for your help...
 
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