GA-K8NSNXP - Nvidia Raid Madness!

[EvilKernel]

Hi All -

I am hoping someone here can shed some light. I am having the hardest time working on this GA-K8NSNXP board for some reason. The problem is I have 2 SATA drives hooked up to the NVIDIA RAid controller. These drives are detected in BIOS just fine and I have created a RAID 1 mirror array using the nvidia controller. The array shows healthy.

Problem is, while running Win2K setup, it sees not one drive, but 2!. I have setup raid5 and 0 arrays before but never a mirror. The Bios is set to boot off of the RAid array I created here, however, it fails to boot because windows is only installing in one of the drives. the other one is just there as setup does not see them as one logical volume. I am thinking the BIOS is seeing one thing while windows is seeing something else.

The other thing that puzzles me is that win2k setup takes ages to format just one of the 60 gig drives. I am talking low-level format times here! no idea why.

anyone seen anything like this ever? I don't even see a BIOS update for this board that relates to this issue.

PS. I am loading the latest nvidia raid driver off the floppy during setup (pressing F6 as required).

This is the hardest time I have ever hard loading 2K. (it has to be 2K because it is our network standard).


thanks in advance for any insight you can provide

 

[dwc]

Hello EvilKernel,

I have the opposite problem...

During installation of my disks, I did not want RAID so I was happy to see 2 drives. After updating the NVIDIA winXP-64 drivers, my 2nd disk has disappeared (with all my data!)

I now see 1 NVIDIA JBOD drive that has 2 partitions. I can't access the 2nd partition without formatting it...

Has anyone got a way around this?

Rgds,
DWC

 

[sd_iconoclast]

EvilKernel, I am having the exact same problem with an MSI K8N Neo4 mother board. I have been trying every workaround I can think of. The more I look into it, the more I think that nvidia just does not have a viable RAID solution.
Tej wholr reason to have a mirrored array, is to allow me to replace a failed hard drive without losing my data. I have noticed that nvidia's documentation on how to rebuild a damaged array, really only shows you how you add a disk to a functional array. Why would I ever want to do that?
I have several motherboards with promise RAID controllers. They include a BIOS utility that allows you to install win2k without RAID, install all the proper RAID drivers into win2k, create the array entirely outside of win2k by using the BIOS utility to copy one ddrive to the other, and then boot into win2k.
The BIOS on this motherboard only allows me to clear the whole drive. Once again? why would I ever need that?