5 replies to this topic

[hog]

Hey all,

Yeah, it's me, I'm back from years of absence! I didn't take the time to poke around the forum to see what was going on, but I do see a few familiar names on the home page! I hope everyone's doing fine and all... at least I am. I'm not here just to say hi though, I'm having trouble...

I recently built a new computer and installed Windows 7 on a Raid 5 array. I had some trouble setting up the array at first as instructions from ASRock are a bit messy IMO, and also I did not have an optical drive (didn't realize that the MB wouldn't have headers for my old IDE drive). I did get everything working, with my array on SATA ports 1-2-3, and the Caviar Green plugged in port 5. Installed Windows, drivers, apps and games (tens of GBs of downloads...)

Yesterday I received my SATA DVD writer and thought I would just plug it in SATA port 4 (last remaining port) and be ready to go. Here comes the trouble.

Did this, and Windows won't boot. It just gets to a black screen with flashing cursor and stays there forever. Everything is recognized properly in BIOS, and I can boot off the Win7 DVD just fine.

I figured I would do that and tell it to "repair Windows" or whatever. It doesn't see my Windows installation at all: trying to load RAID drivers off a USB device or DVD (tried both), Windows still isn't recognized.

Now for the tricky part. When I browse to choose drivers, I initially see my empty Caviar, and the USB drive that holds the drivers. I load the drivers and Windows still doesn't appear. I go back to browsing for RAID drivers, and now my array shows up! I can browse the files from the Windows install, all my drives and everything show up, but the install disc still tells me that I don't have Windows installed, so obviously I can't repair it. I did use the Windows disc to look for errors, but that returned nothing.

I also tried unplugging anything unnecessary, plugging everything like it was before the DVD drive arrived, plugging drives in different SATA ports... Nothing helps.

In the BIOS the SATA controller is set to RAID. I'm afraid it's trying to see a raid composed of all 4-5 drives together? The BIOS calls whatever drive is in port 4 "RAID: 'name of drive'". What? Any drive in port 5 shows up as "SATA: 'name of drive'". If I boot into the RAID controller everything looks fine though. ASRock says to "install ODD drivers in SATA port 5": I tried plugging the drive there, but am I supposed to get drivers for it? But even then, if I go back to my initial configuration (without the DVD drive) Windows still won't boot.

Could bootsect be broken somehow? How do I repair it? I could just format, but my Windows was a clean install and it took days to install all my programs and games, so that really would be a pain. This has to be recoverable, since until plugging in the DVD drive everything worked perfectly.

I've run out of options... Please help?

ASRock 970 Extreme 3
AMD FX-6100
Patriot Viper Extreme 2x4GB DD3-1866
3xSeagate 320GB SATAII in Raid 5 (Win7)
WD Caviar Green 1.5TB SATAII (empty for now)
LG DVD Writer SATA
Antec Truepower 750W

I also found a thread on Tom's Hardware that looks similar, and maybe this answer would be the solution, but I don't understand how to do that.

[m.oreilly]

i've put winders on another drive, and booted to it, downloaded easybcd, installed it, and gave the array master boot, rebooted, and array booted right up. you can try windows repair or hiren's boot cd, but easybcd can really be a great fix, if you have, like you, a spare drive to work from

[stormrosson]

Yo Hog, the real prob is with the amd south bridge, it is a bitch to get the the drivers stable. I finally got my Vertex 4's (2x 128GB raid 0) by taking each drive and using another W7 box to initialize them thru admin tools>disk management. After each one was set as a healthy partitioned driive, then delete the volume and create it again only this time when it gets to the format part do a low level format (no quicky) do this to each drive in the array. This sounds stupid but after 4 days of f'n with it I tried this and voila' ...I did this procedure 3 times again over a coupla days to check repeatability and it worked every time. Also u may need to put your optic and other drives not in the array on a separate controller, luckily my 890FXA GD70 has a Jmicron onboard with the amd sb. If u don't have a second controler onboard u may wanna try a cheap simple sata III controller card to put them on. Also I found a workable driver set at MSI Global (not US) for the 990fxa boards (the 890 and 990 are the same) lastly make sure u have the latest bios ver.....Good luck bud hope this helps....Stormy

[hog]

I installed and ran EasyBCD to reconfigure my bootloader: I saw that it had disappeared from my raid array, which somewhat explains why Windows wouldn't boot. I created a new bootloader for launching the Windows that's on my array, formatted the "spare" drive, and everything is now fine.

Nice and easy. Thanks a lot m.o! BTW, my brother is still enjoying the videocard I bought from you a while ago. Arkham City was the first game he couldn't run at max settings. Not bad.

[hog]

Wow storm, that seems like a real pain. In retrospect maybe I should have bought a board that includes a second controller and/or more ports; everything would probably be simpler. If I ever re-do my array, I think I'll follow your procedure. It's simple enough and looks quite safe.

I don't know how plugging in an optical drive screwed up the bootloader, but at least ultimately it worked. I guess that now I just have to not change anything...

[m.oreilly]

super! yep, the amd controllers can be a bit difficult with handling different options at once, glad easybcd worked out ok. yeah, after a bit i kicked myself for selling that card lol, but after many nvidia gpu, i'm back to ati