I'm trying to reinstall windows XP on a computer with a RAID array. I'm not very familiar w/ RAID so I'm scratching my head alot. I keep getting the blue screen after the first time it says "windows is starting". I've tried just letting it do it's thing and I've pressed F6 and installed the latest drivers both w/ the same results.
Someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong.
I know the physical setup is good because it was working fine before, but for some reason it won't let me start over.

What RAID format are you attempting?

Is your BIOS/RAID controller properly configured?

Typically you have to trash everything and restart at the BIOS/Controller. This should also clear any setup or concurrent installations on the drive.

I'm not sure what you would call it, but there is one drive hooked directly to the motherboard raid controller and there are four connected to a PCI raid controller. When I go into the raid BIOS, it sees four drives 0-3 (279 GB each). I just reconfigured the drives in the raid BIOS so that it is one 558 GB drive. I am now doing the Secure Erase. 2 1/2 hrs. into it and it's at 60%.
Should I be ready to install XP after this?

What is the fifth drive? Just an erroneous extra? The two wont splice together...

I take it you're trying to run RAID5 (striped) with the 4 drives (effective space of ~3 drives)? Wait, nevermind, you're doing RAID1 (two drives mirrored to the other two).

You should be good after the data clear, but you shouldn't have had to do a full wipe -- just a ..fuck I forget the term, "RAID ID reset" or something like that..

who makes your motherboard and what chip set is on it?

Its a Tyan Thunder board with AMD chipset. The PCI Raid controller is an adaptec.

it sounds like you're pre-loading the wrong driver for the controller that you're installing the OS on.

if you're installing the OS on the 1 drive that's attached to the mobo's controller and want that to be your OS partition/drive and the 4 drives you have in raid5 on the adaptec controller to just be a big storage drive/partition make sure when you F6 you're installing the driver for the mobo controller, not the adaptec.

if you want to install the OS on the 4 drives in the raid array then I'd recommend removing the 1 drive that's on its own controller until you get the OS installed.

BTW are we talking PATA, SATA or SCSI (give a breakdown of all drives/controllers)?

Just tried unplugging the spare drive connected to the motherboard and I get the same results, so that's not the problem.

The driver is the latest straight from adaptec.com

The Raid controller is an adaptec 2420SA with SATA ports. The drives are all maxtor 3Gb/s 280GB drives. And yes, the OS needs to be on the adaptec Raid setup.

also blue screens with only the single drive connected to the motherboard.

I just tried another copy of XP and it works.

So, the copy of XP that works only works up to the point when the windows logo is first displayed on the screen. It copies files from the DVD to HDD just fine, but the driver files from the floppy are "not found" although it found them just fine on the initial transfer to RAM. Blue screens on first display of windows logo.
I don't know why I took on this task. I'm fucking fed up with computers and the ass backwards logic of computer engineers.

I've updated the RAID card BIOS with no improvement.
Just for shits, I installed MSDOS 6.0 from 3 floppies and it works great. The only problem with DOS is that it sees a 55GB partition as 2GB which is exactly as I expected.
I'd still like to get XP on the machine if anyone has any input.

Updated the BIOS both on the RAID card and on the motherboard with no improvements.
I tried disconnectiong the PCI raid controller. The 5th HDD still connected to the motherboard SATA controller is now recognized which it wasn't before. Trying to install XP onto it, I get the exact same error. Just now installed DOS on it and that works fine.
So this narrows it down to some sort of Windows BS that is not necisarilly related to the PCI RAID controller.
Furthur more, the error is a 0x0000007B which means that windows cannot access the boot disk. This really confuses me since DOS which is over a decade old has no problems here.
I'm seriously stabbing in the dark here.
I know there are a handfull of you on here that eat this sort of crap for lunch every day. If I've stumped all the egg heads on this board, I guess I'm really upstream w/o a paddle.

Have you tried a different motherboard?

Does your motherboard SATA have a RAID option? Have you tried disabling the onboard SATA completely and running with just the PCI-RAID getup?

Have you tried a different motherboard?
No, I have no other motherboards that will accept a PCI-X card so this is not an option.

Does your motherboard SATA have a RAID option?
Yes

Have you tried disabling the onboard SATA completely and running with just the PCI-RAID getup?
Yes. It seems to work, and even takes a DOS install but XP gives me the blue screen with the cannot access boot drive error.

The exact error code is:
***STOP: 0X0000007B (0XF78DA524,0XC0000034,0X00000000,0X00000000)

So you're getting the "Loading Windows" screen then it blips out? As if it's reading the drive (drives) but crashes?

What boot device order are you using?

I wish you could take screen shots of your BIOS configuration, RAID BIOS configuration and a video of the bootup....

Do you have any other devices connected to the system other than CPU, RAM, Video, RAID controller?

I can't help but think that either the motherboard controller or RAID controller are configured incorrectly (try resetting to default settings?); or the wrong controller drivers are being used; bad drive(s) or even the random chance that it's bad memory or cables.

What PSU are you using?

Seeking a lot of potentially irrelevant data, but could allow for the disclosure of something useful.

The thing that makes this extremely disturbing is that XP was installed on it before, but the guy I'm doing this for wanted to put XP onto a smaller partition specified in the RAID BIOS and keep all data files on a seperate RAID partition. We are aiming for 55GB for XP+program files and 500GB for data. I need to get this thing back to him soon, but I'm afraid that he's going to be getting back a non-functioning computer and that's going to make me look like a complete ass.

So you're getting the "Loading Windows" screen then it blips out?
- Yes, it blue screens with a 7B stop error. One version does this on the initial load when it says "loading windows" from a blue bar at the bottom of the screen. The other version gives me the same error, but not until the first time the windows logo appears for about a half second, then blue screen.

As if it's reading the drive (drives) but crashes?
- From the error code, I am able to conclude that windows cannot access the boot drive.

What boot device order are you using?
- floppy, DVD-ROM, HDD

I wish you could take screen shots of your BIOS configuration, RAID BIOS configuration and a video of the bootup....
- If you want to go that deep, I'll bring it to you and attempt to make it worth your' time. (and all you GBN freaks can forget about homoerotic favors)

Do you have any other devices connected to the system other than CPU, RAM, Video, RAID controller?
- keyboard

I can't help but think that either the motherboard controller or RAID controller are configured incorrectly (try resetting to default settings?); or the wrong controller drivers are being used; bad drive(s) or even the random chance that it's bad memory or cables.
- Then why does DOS work fine? Gotta be some windows BS...

What PSU are you using?
- PSU?? Its a Tyan Thunder S2885A Motherboard with AMD8000 chipset w/ dual AMD 2.2GHz processors if that helps.