Windows Re-install on dell

[adrumsolo4u]

Here are the facts:
the computer will not boot to the sata drives.
I acquired the computer from someone who got annoyed with it too.
It was running three sata drives with a raid mirroring set on. the third drive looks like it was doing nothing but sucking energy.
The guy who had it obviously messed with it, the raid was turned off for the HDDs. so i turned that on, raid says its not okay. I tried to re-set it up with a raid stripe system using the two (working) HDDs. (this was after i already tried to re-install windows. Then put in windows re-install disc (courtesy of dell, yes it's a dell) and i get through the whole set-up process, until it comes to starting windows. then it sits and sits telling me it's starting windows (for the actual installation).

Any Hints, tricks, or ideas would be appreciated.

 

[grimesy69]

Hi

The reason why the 3rd drive may not look like its not doing a great deal is because when you have 3 drives in a RAID, i am assuming RAID 5. One drive is actually not used in the mirror. It's just kept for redundancy.

Does this motherboard have built in RAID controller or are you using a seperate module.

You may require to install RAID drivers. You press F6 near enough straight after booting from the disc.

regards.

 

[adrumsolo4u]

If it is raid 5 it doesn't say so. in the raid setup it doesn't even appear.
i did try pressing F6 but it didn't work. after a lot of waiting it got all the way to beginning to install windows, and it froze at inspecting the HDD. I do have an available PATA drive, so i can get the computer to work, but if i did go that way, how would i set up the SATA hard drives from there? and after getting those to work how would i be able to take away the PATA drive and run entirely on SATA?

thank you for the suggestion though.