GA-73PVM-S2H and RAID

[furgie]

Hi Guys,
I have two Seagate 1.5 Tb Barracuda SATA3 disks configured as mirrored RAID. Vista Ultimate (32 bit) will not see them during installation (and thus I cannot install the OS). I have tried loading the RAID driver from both floppy and USB stick Iand have confirmed it is current from the web site).
The array seems OK in the BIOS. I have flashed BIOS to F8.

 Both drives work OK if configured as IDE and used standalone with Vista.

Really confused. Wondering if the MoBo BIOS or Vista it's self will not support a 1.5 Tb Mirror.

Any ideas? Thanks.

[chupo]

Have you tried Vista x64?

[Elemental_Dragon]

Have you went into the RAID configuration (seperate to the BIOS) and set them up there?

If I recall, there's 2 settings you need to change to get RAID to work, followed by CTRL+I on the screen just after the POST screen which will take you into a configuration page to set up the 2 disks into a RAID array. Once that's done, go back into the BIOS and set up Boot priorities and HDD boot priorities and then boot from CD to install Windows and load the driver from the CD (just take the disk out when it asks for the driver, stick the Gigabyte 1 in, it'll load then ask for the Windows disk to be put back in and that should be you)

~Bex

[steven3554]

I too have had a lot of problems with this motherboard trying to set up RAID 0 on XP. The DOS drivers would not load in the standard way (using floppy). In order to get the installation to first see the stripe I had to slipstream the DOS driver using nlite (I don't know if there is a version of nlite for vista because I don't use vista). However, after the installation completes and goes to the 2nd reboot it blue screens even after slipstreaming the windows driver into the installation. I have been told that problems with RAID can be due to errors on the disks. I was using 2 80 Gb seagates previously striped on another gigabyte board, so I not sure how accurate this is, but upon testing them they did indeed both fail some seatools tests (downloadable from seagate). These have now been replaced by seagate and are error free, yet still the installation fails. The next suggestion has been that there is a fault on the chipset, which I'm about to get tested. I have managed to get a RAID 0 installation to boot using windows backup from an IDE disk. However, something gets skrewed in the reg because when you login it just logs straight out again.

[steven3554]

Further to above: Now had the MB tested and indeed it had a faulty chipset. Due to the 2 week wait to have it repaired I nearly purchased another, but had them test it first and that too was faulty, although a different fault. So if you are still having problems it might be worth your while getting yours tested.