Storage Solutions Boot Disk Failure! HELLLLLLLP

N

nottheguru

Disciple
I have 2 WD3200 sata drives in a mirror array (nvidia).

Bios setup:
Raid is enable for primary and secondary on Sata 1 and Sata 2 drive
Sata is enabled
Boot priority is set for the raid configuration
Sata drives do not show up in Standard Cmos features (only DVD drives show up)

I pressed F10 on boot and deleted raid array and re-entered it

When I let it boot it tries to boot by lan and when I press esc it says Exiting Nvidia Boot Agent and gives me the "Boot Disk Failure, Insert System disk and press enter" message.

I tried windows repair feature from xp cd but drives are not recognized (only dvd and external drives are). I also have an 80g drive that I used a file sychro program on to copy the original c: drive contents to but it won't boot either.

Please help.....
 
that 80gb hdd wont boot, forget that

is it raid 0? or 1? if u r mirroring the drive, i suggest removing 1 drive and without raid booting up the hdd

seems like your hdd's arent getting detected during bootup, make sure they are spinning

and make sure hdd to boot is set for raid in bios
 
deepak said:
that 80gb hdd wont boot, forget that

is it raid 0? or 1? if u r mirroring the drive, i suggest removing 1 drive and without raid booting up the hdd

seems like your hdd's arent getting detected during bootup, make sure they are spinning
and make sure hdd to boot is set for raid in bios
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I assume from your 1st comment that a raid 1 (mirrored) drive can't be sync'd with a non-raid drive.

I am mirroring so I'll try disconnecting one and disable raid in bios to se what happens.

I do have another question now since my original post:

I installed the raid drivers and did a fresh install of xp on that 80g driven and I went into System/Harware/Drives and told it to search for new drives and they popped up, but I can't see them in windows explorer.
Is that even possible?
I really want to copy my settings etc to the install on the 80gb, or will that work?
I also installed Nvidia's MediaShiled and plugged the original Raid 1 drives in and the array does show up in MediaShiled and shows the array is healthy.

After this is over NO MORE RAID for me, i'll just set one up to clone to another.
 
I tried booting with one drive unplugged then the other and then both and they were recognized together and independent of each other in bios on every attempt but I still got the "Boot Disk Failure, Insert System disk and press enter" message.

So... I plugged the 80g fresh install back in and booted up. went into device manager and told it to look for new drives and they come up there so I looked under the volume tab and all information fields were blank. I clicked on populate and it showed

Disk: Disk 1
Type: unkown
Status: not initialized
Partition Style: not applicable
capacity 305243mb
unallocated: 305243mb
reserved space: 0mb

i suspect this is because it's part of a raid array and wasn't booted from this drive. Is that a same assumption?

Any other ideas?
 
this is wierd, not showing up the contents of the hdd even cause by the very definition of mirroring, it should have the data accessible when 1 hdd fails

do one thing, plug the raid back in and boot using the 80gig install

right click on my comp and go to manage

here go to disk management

ur raid should be shown here, even if its not coming up on my comp

right click on the raid drive and go to change drive letters and paths

click on add and mount the partition to a folder in ur 80 gig drive, that folder must be created here only and not in explorer

report back the results

and try plugging in the other drive too seperately (mayb 1 drive is faulty)
 
left office and went home after last post. alaska is 11 hours behind you. i should use a forum with closer time zone but everybody here is so great at helping. i posted on another forum right after i posted here and had 13 views 0 replies when i left last night and that time zone was more compatible with mine so one would think it would get more replies. Anyway, you guys are great and i see now that saving money is not the only reason U.S is moving tech support to india

i try your idea when i go the office today.
 
seems to me like ur partition table got erased somehow, try recovering it using some hdd recovery tool

bootitng iirc can sometimes restore partition information, give it a go
 
How do i do that when i can't get access to the drives. they don't show up in my computer or when i try to do a windows repair from the xp cd? is there a secret to doing this?
 
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