I am facing the following issue with a w2K Server with Abit KT7A-RAID mother board. The board has two I/O RAID ports controlled by High Point HPT370 chipset and two normal IDE ports. I installed W2KS on a 120GB HD after connecting it to the normal IDE port. No issues there. All ok. Then installed the HPT370 drivers and then moved the Hard disk cable to the KT7A-RAID IDE port. The BIOS for the High Point controller detects the disk and no issues on booting. However, when W2K starts, it comes up with a message "W2K cannot start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Cannot read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Check w2k documentation about hardware disk configuration". When the cable is put back into the standard IDE port, the disk is bootable. Where is this configuration information written? I have seen somewhere that there is a boot.ini file - is this the one? (I could not find this file in the boot drive). Can some W2K Server expert throw some light on this? Much obliged for your time.

When you install Windows it builds some files depending on your hardware setup. So you can't just take a hard drive out and carry it from system to system. What you SHOULD HAVE DONE is connect the hard drive to the RAID setup, boot up from the Windows CD, and when the screen passes, press the F6 key and install the RAID controller drivers. Then proceed to install Windows. I'm not sure what will happen if you boot from the OS CD, press the F6 key and then install the drivers. You may be able to run a Repair otpion or something...

you could allso try to fix the MBR. reboot with the CD and then get into recovery console. at the command promt try this command FIXBOOT or FIXMBR. your problem is the the MBR is pionting to the disk0 on contoller0. so when the OS boots the MBR is telling the machine where the OS files are at. it no longer sees the hard drive there and craps out. if you fix the MBR you might get your machine to boot good luck AJ "ye of itchy azz hole, have stinky finger"

What is the purpose of installing the one hard drive on the RAID controller? The idea of RAID is to have 2 identical drives or more on the controller to provide the desired configuration. Typically they are RAID 0, RAID1 or RAID 0+1 for onboard RAID controllers. RAID-0 RAID Level 0 is not redundant, hence does not truly fit the "RAID" acronym. In level 0, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping. RAID-1 RAID Level 1 provides redundancy by writing all data to two or more drives. The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost. This is a good entry-level redundant system, since only two drives are required; however, since one drive is used to store a duplicate of the data, the cost per megabyte is high. This level is commonly referred to as mirroring. This is something that you need to think about in more detail. IF you want to use the RAID function on the board instead of standard IDE then at least one more drive is needed and a Windows install from scratch is also going to need to be done. As Lucid pointed out the prompt for a RAID driver during install needs to be performed. Check your motherboard manual for instructions on getting a driver installed. Good luck Richard