Vista - Vista 64 Home Premium Installation on RAID

I know that this has been dealt with before and I've followed the useful John Barnett tutorial without success.

Brief history: Recently got a new system with Vista Home Prem 64 SP1 on a single 500GB drive. Before going too far on setting it up, I got 2 new SATA 500GB drives with the intent of a clean install on a mirrored nVIDIA RAID - have retained the working single disc Vista drive and removed it from the system for now. Set up RAID in BIOS with the RAID as primary boot, DVD as 2nd boot. F10 to add 2 SATA drives into single mirrored RAID, selected Rebuild and Bootable option. Booted from Vista DVD - RAID shows up as healthy on splash screen. Got as far as the Install location. Set up new partition, formatted that, loaded latest drivers (downloaded from Biostar site) using USB stick.

First question - am I right in loading nVidia SATA Controller, RAID Controller and RAID Device drivers? (have tried many combinations in the 20+ install attempts!).

Windows will not recognise the RAID volume as a valid installation location. If I delete the array, each individual drive is recognised and can be formatted. I have tried installing Vista to a separate PATA drive, booting from that and then installing to the SATA RAID but that isn't recognised as a drive (perhaps because I ddn't load the RAID drivers on the PATA drive).

I've tried flashing the BIOS with the latest firmware to no effect, tried setting up an 80GB partition to install Vista on, downloaded Maxtors Blaster utility to do a full format of the drives - no joy. I have not yet tried removing 2GB of RAM as opinion seems to vary as to whether this has any effect.

If I try to install my old XP 32 OS to get a starting point, I just get a BSOD reporting a PCI problem (have a PCI USB hub and PATA IDE card there).

Once / if I get this working, the next issue will be to get my WLAN PCI card working - have had several attempts with that (using latest drivers) and even bought a new one- not a flicker of life on the link but Device Mgr reported it as being OK.

The pub option currently sounds the favourite! Any advice / comments gratefully received before I give up on the RAID option.

System Spec:
Biostar GF8100-M2-SE GeForce 8100 Socket AM2+ mATX Motherboard
AMD Athlon Dual Core X2 5000+
Samsung 4GB DDR2 800Mhz PC6400
2 * Maxtor Diamond Max 22 500GB SATA2/7200RPM/8MB Cache
Sony 20XDVD+/-RW Dual Layer & Dual Format With Lightscribe
Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit Edition SP1

UPDATE
After much struggling, have finally got a solution:

Carrying on from where I was (with a Vista install on a spare PATA drive), I deleted / rebuilt the RAID array during a reboot and used Drive Mgr to inititalise / format the volume. This then got me a working RAID array and I then installed Vista to it, BUT I couldn't set it as a bootable array when I set it up. Vista would then run up OK on the drive but wouldn't boot from it. Several attempts to repair the installation by repairing the boot sector failed. I then removed the PATA drive, booted with the Vista DVD and managed to install to the RAID (allowing it to save the former installation in WIndows.old directory). All now seems OK and I am in the process of building the rest of the system now!

You should just install the 64 bit RAID drivers during install.
--
Paul


"BabyBish" wrote:

Thanks for that - in the working system that I finally got, I installed all supported drivers (SATA Controller, RAID Controller and RAID Device) on the basis that I didn't want to have to do a whole new install if it decided that I'd missed one!