Vista Home Premium and RAID

[Questor]

Ok, so I order a Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 motherboard, X2 5200+ AM2, 2 GB PC800 Corsair XMS thinking I am just going to take my two Seagate 80 GB SATA II hard drives, create RAID 0 and slap Vista Home Premium on there.

It was a good idea.

First, I cannot locate NVIDIA NVRAID drivers that I can install during Vista load. Second, I change to the Gigabyte SATA and set up RAID 0..Vista asks for the drive/drivers (I install the package from GB no problem) where it will be installed. Smooth as silk...159 GB RAID 0 Primary recognized..format, etc...Vista says, "OKIE DOKIE! I have all I need to continue installing!" Install proceeds, first restart...restart...restart...restart...restart....restart...restart.....

After restart Vista will not recognize the darned drives (RAID array) to boot from it and of course goes straight to reboot OR with my intervention back to installing itself from the start all over again.

Please, for the love of all that is sacred in the world of computing..HOW do I get either NVRAID or Gigabyte RAID installed and then get Vista to realize it is there? I do have the Vista drivers for the Gigabyte raid and have the latest NFORCE drivers, but in an executable package (as NVIDIA packages them at the download page of course).


Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5
AMD X2 5200 AM2
Corsair PC800 XMS 2 x 1GB
Seagate Barracuda7200 RPM 80 GB SATA II x 2
EVGA 7900 GS x 2 (I pray in SLI IF I can ever get Vista installed and running!)
Samsung DVD Burner
Seasonic 600W modular PS

Thanks,
Questor

 

[hectorsm]

Did you already do the RAID setup in the BIOS?

Anyway...to get the drivers from the lastest NVidia package do the following:

1. Right click the NVidia driver package and save the extracted files locally. I am using WinRAR to do the extract but I would imagine Windows XP can do the same.
2. Save the sataraid and the sata_ide directories to another drive or something else like a cd, dvd, usb flash drive, or floppy.
3. Boot from DVD and locate the drivers from those directories.
4. Continue with the Vista install.

I had my 2 Seagate 320GB drives in RAID 0 done this way. I did not have any problems in the three days I used Vista64. I went back to XP because of other issues not related to RAID.

Good Luck!

 

[Questor]

Yes, I did set up the RAID in the BIOS..both the NVIDIA section and the Gigabyte section.

Thanks for that suggestion. I will give it a try directly and see how things go.

Questor