XP PRO with bootable raid (mirroring) NTLDR missing recovery no see hd

[smilen65]

Help, I just finished building my new system, and ended up building it with my old ram while i waited for my new ram to arrive. New ram came yesterday and i had to clear the cmos to make it boot, when i did this the onboard raid was turned off by the bios, I was able to boot fine but in my computer i noticed I now had two hard drives, so i went into bios and reactivated the raid when I did that I could no longer boot, Ntldr missing. So instead of asking for help at this point I decided to try to rebuild the array in the raid utility now I cant boot with or without raid active. To make things worse when I boot with xp pro and go to the recovery prompt my Hard drives cant be found. Bios sees them and if I go forward as if to install xp it will see them but not in recovery so i cant copy ntldr to the c drive. Please help

 

[smilen65]

BTW System specs

Foxconn nforce 4 ultra board with sata raid
athlon 64 3000+ venice core
x700 pro video card
2 sata2 3gb/s 160 gig drives
1gig dual channel ram

 

[PanicX]

In all likelyhood, when you rebuilt the array, you wiped out any data on the drives. Normally you'll get a prompt before you finish the rebuild, that will warn you that all data will be destroyed.

Anyhow, if thats not the case, all you should need to do is through in your Windows install CD, press "F6" when prompted at the beginning and load a driver disk for your RAID controller. Then do a windows repair and you should be fine. If windows repair doesnt find your installation, then your data is gone and you'll need to reinstall anyway.

 

[Neogetz]

Same situation

I have the same situation, but I did not do anything with that. So now if I enable RIAD in bios than missing NTLDR, and recovery does not see my drives (I loaded the corresponding driver), but if I desable RAID the system works fine but with two hard drives with mostly identical data on them. So any suggestion?

 

[PanicX]

Let me restate your problem to be sure I understand it correctly.

Currently you have Windows installed on a harddrive that is connected to a RAID controller. You also have another drive on this controller which you copied your hard drive to. RAID is not enabled on your controller.

You want to RAID these 2 drives in a mirror configuration, but when you enable the RAID in the BIOS, windows won't boot up (error NTLDR is missing). If you run the windows setup recovery and load the correct drivers, no drives are found.

But if you disable the RAID, everything works fine.

Is this correct?


If so, your problem is that you have not created a logical drive on the RAID controller. Even though you enabled RAID the controller must be configured to "show" a logical drive to the computer. You can configure the controller if you look for the proper interupt key sequence during system startup. CAUTION: ONCE YOU CREATE A LOGICAL DRIVE, ALL YOUR DATA WILL BE ERASED!!

Be sure you have a backup of any data you need before you enable RAID.