Windows 7 Setup sees RAIDed drives as independent drives?

Question

I'm installing Windows 7 on a PC with a DFI Lanparty nf4 Ultra-D motherboard. I'm using the onboard SATA raid to combine two 250gig hard drives into a single drive.

I'm the BIOS, I have raid enabled, and I have both drives enabled as being raidable.

Then, after the BIOS, I enter the nVidia nForce Raid utility and create a new raid disc using both drives in striped mode. So now it's a single 500gig drive. It is set to be bootable.

Next I boot into the Windows 7 Setup on the DVD. When it gets to the point where you choose what drive to install to, it shows two drives:

• Drive 0 - Unallocated Space - 250g
• Drive 1 - Unallocated Space - 250g

I proceeded to choose "Load Drivers" and picked the latest SATA Raid WHQL drivers I got from nVidia's website. Setup successfully loaded them and took me back to the drive menu, but it doesn't show me a single drive still. It shows the same thing. 2 drives of unallocated space.

Also, it will only allow me to create a new partition on Drive 0, not Drive 1. For Drive 1 it says the disc is marked as non-bootable and that I need to enable it to be bootable in the BIOS...

I know that I'm using the right raid drivers here. Anyone ever seen this before?

Answer 1

It sounds to me that there is something wrong with the driver itself. Perhaps you can try an older driver, or one that DFI provides rather than the plain vanilla Nvidia one.

Also are you running x64? Are you using the appropriate version of the driver (64 vs 32bit) ?

If you were to reboot and go back into the RAID utility, does it still show 1 volume?

Also I know its a long shot.. but are both drives the exact same model?

Answer 2

Your walkthrough is yet incomplete because you have only installed one driver!

Install drivers for: the RAID Controller, the RAID Device, and the SATA Controller! Only then will the striped array appear as an HDD for your Windows 7 Installation CD 'select partition' dialog.