I'm having some issues with my sata drives. I was having problems with xp so I decided to do a fresh install. I used Dban to nuke to drives(make sure there was no left over info or viruses) I went to reload xp, but for some reason I couldn't get it to boot from the cd. I used the floppy disk install and everything is fine until I try to load the raid drivers, I specify the drivers and it continues the installation process. Then a message pops up and says, "nvraid.sys not found" the installation quits. I have tried another driver disk and also checked my bios to make sure I had enabled the raid. Is there something I'm missing? I also went into the raid configuration and set the drives to striping, they appear fine. They were working in the raid config before with xp installed, what went wrong this time?

Did you press F6 during SETUP? Right at the start of the automatic install process for Windows 2000 or XP, as soon as the blue screen appears, you will see a prompt at the bottom of the screen asking you to "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver..."Press F6. Nothing will visibly happen, but after the installation files are copied from the CD, you will see an extra screen for the loading of storage device drivers. Press 'S' to 'specify an additional device.' You will be prompted to "Please insert the disk labeled Manufacturer-supplied hardware support disk into Drive A:" Do so and hit enter. After reading the disk, the correct driver for your controller should be shown on screen. Select it and press enter, then enter again to confirm the choice. Windows will then continue to install as normal. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Yes, I do press F6, and it tells me that the raid drivers are going to be loaded, I then coninue with the installation and it tells me to reinsert disk 4. I do so, but before it gets to disk 5 the message pops up and installation quits. I still don't understand why I can't boot from cd. I have set it to boot from cd in the bios but when it tries, it just hangs and I have to reboot. Is there a setting in the bios that I have screwed up? I reset it to default and it didn't fix it. This is a retail copy of xp that is the full install, not an upgrade.

It does not seem to be a BIOS problem. What you are describing seems like your CDROM is not being read too well by the CDROM/DVDROM drive. You could try cleaning the CDROM or try using a different CDROM/DVROM drive. With regards to the floppy boot process you say that ".....Then a message pops up and says, "nvraid.sys not found" ....". This sounds like you are not putting the floppy which contains the RAID driver. This may be a different floppy from floppy 4 which may contain drivers but does not have the RAID driver. This sugggests to me that you may have a separate floppy for the RAID driver. Try providing that instead. If you have not got a separate floppy for the raid drivers, then they will be on your motherboard CD. You will need to copy it from there to floppy 4 if it has anymore space left on it (do not delete any files on it though) or to a new floppy which you must then provide when it prompts for floppy 4 to read the RAID driver. I think you will find that the floppy method may work thereafter. Finally are you actually installing it as RAID or just using one of the RAID ports for the hard drive. You may find that if you are not installing raid that you may not actually need the raid driver until after you have installed the OS. In which case you can provide it from the motherboard CD or wherever they are located. Incidentally what is your motherboard make? and what is the SP level of your XP CD? is it Gold / SP1 or SP2?. Finally while I was googling I came across this statement: Turns out this is a known problem which affects all operating systems and multiple imaging programs. (but not all the time) If you do a Google search (on "FILE NVRAID.SYS COULD NOT BE FOUND") you can find threads going back a few years with many many people spending countless hours trying to figure it out. Go to the NVIDIA site and it's like they never heard of it. The workaround is to create a slipstreamed version of WINxxx and add the NVIDIA drivers to it. If you are having the problem, for whatever reason, it just can't be solved via the F6 floppy route. Check the threads, it's not related to particular hard drives or OS but it only appears to be happening with NVIDIA RAID solutions. I hope you got a few things here that you can try. Best of luck. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

I am trying to actually set this up as a raid. Before when I loaded windows the two hard drives showed up as 1 drive when I went to install windows. When I press F6 to specify the new drives I insert my floppy with the raid drivers on it(came with the mobo, and says Nvidia raid drivers) windows loads the drivers(supposedly)and continues the install. I have not tried loading the nvidia raid drivers onto the 4th install disk, I will try that and see if it will work. Thanks for all your help!

Can you please tell me the make, model and revision of your motherboard. I would like to check its manual and see if I can help that way. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

The motherboard is an abit NF8. I'm not sure of the bios revision but it is the original, I haven't updated it. Abit has a bios update for it witch I am going to try, I just haven't had the time yet.Its just weird that I had it set up perfectly before, and now I can't get it to work. I guess it is possible that the dvd drive is bad, I'm going to install it in another computer and check it. After reading some of the threads of others who have had this problem, I know that I can build the raid0 setup at the desktop level witch I will do if I can't figure this out. Again thanks for all of the help.