WinXP Install problem on GA-7N400 Pro2

[Ritalin Kid]

I recently swapped out my old KR7A-133R with a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2. I placed my Zip drive, CDRW, DVDROM, on the 2 regular IDE channels and my 2 60 gig Maxtor drives on the GigaRAID controller.

First time installing Windows XP was tricky I had to try everything including using a Win98 boot disk to fdisk the mbr and finally I got Windows XP to install to my RAID 0 array. The main problem was I kept getting a "File hal.dll is corrupt or missing" because it seemed the hard drive boot record was booting to the old WinXP install.

Well I had to wipe Windows due to a registry corruption that was my own fault and I have tried to repeat EVERYTHING I did to duplicate what I did to fix this problem before and now I get a message saying Windows cannot find the Windows installation and to refer to my WinXP manual. Any thoughts? I'm thinking of just putting one 60 Gig on the regular IDE controller and the other on the GigaRAID controller thus forgetting about using RAID 0 altogether.

And yes I have formatted and formatted and formatted everything I could think of..

[Ritalin Kid]

Man... are my questions that rare or does everyone have a secret pact to ignore me? lol

Regardless for future reference I came home and spent a few hours on it. This is what I came up with.. I had to fdisk both 60 gigs by themselves in ATA mode, then still delete the RAID array and rebuild it then the WinXP install finally worked right.

[poopeyhed2]

When I set up the RAID 0 with the GigaRAID, I always got a corrupted system, saying that I was missing the NTDLR file, pissed me off because it'd do that every three weeks. My remedy was to stop using the GigaRAID because it's utter crap and bought 2 HighPoint Rocketheads so that I can do SATA RAID. Since then, I sold the Gigabyte board.

[roley]

I have built three systems with GA7N400PRO2...it is only board with that mix of features that I want...

I am unsure if it is actually the best board out there...but it is very good.

I have not used Gigaraid functions...

I have found however, that you will find it hard going if you are using the old tools like DOS fdisk and format.com........these are difficult.

You will also have issues with WinXP (I have never had easy run like with Win98SE) if you have multiple installations of XP on competing disks in one system...WinXP does not play like that.

You need to look at earlier posts from few days ago regarding NTLDR corrupt etc to see what other techs on this forum have done to workaround that inflexibility.

Also note that if you are interested technical stuff or enthusiast etc...investing in something like Paragon Partition Manager pays off when partitioning and formatting drives, especially SATA and SCSI. It gets you away from DOS command prompt and into GUI and offers hyperspeed formatting and the click of a mouse button.

Check that out it might help

Good Luck

Rohan

[Ritalin Kid]

Honestly once I got GigaRAID working and installed WinXP man the install flys.. I can definately notice a performance boost so I wouldn't say that it utter crap definately easier to work around than my old HPT372 that was built onto KR7A-133R board.

As far as using DOS and fdisk I had no problems in RAID or ATA mode... worked like a champ it just seems that the RAID array doesn't allow XP to complete format the mbr so unless you rebuild the RAID array it continues to try and boot the old installation of XP. So far everything is OK and I'm impressed with the performance boost.

[poopeyhed2]

Oh no, the performance to it is beautiful -- but knowing the fact taht it'll work when it wants or that it'll crap out on you anytime drove me nuts. I believe there was a petition on AMD MB in the forum addressing Gigabyte to get rid of the GigaRAID.

[Ritalin Kid]

I'll take note to keep an eye on it any chance that system built on GigaRAID was overclocked?

[poopeyhed2]

Originally I had it overclocked from a 2500+ to a 3200+ after it got fudged up, I put it back to stock, screwed up one more time, so I figured, SATA RAID here I come.