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[Captante Profile]

Posting this in the hope that sharing my experience which didn't work, somone will either come up with what I did wrong, or at least be spared the trouble of doing somthing similar.

(I searched but didn't find any topics with the same situation... sorry in advance if this is a duplicate post!)

My main rig is an Asus Nforce 590 SLI Crosshair, A64 5000+ @ 2.8ghz, EVGA 8800GTX, Creative X-Fi, 2 GB Mushkin XP2-8500 @800mhz with 2 optical drives & most importantly I think, 2 x 2 drive RAID arrays. *(rock-solid stable for months under XP alone)

Array# 1 w/XP Pro = 2 x 320gb Seagate's mirrored & set up as boot partition in RAID BIOS
Array #2 w/no OS = 2 x 500gb WD's mirrored (formatted in NTFS only)

Both arrays were running fine on XP and when I attempted to install Vista Ultimate (Upgrade version.. attempted installled from within XP) this evening everything appeared to go smoothly.. so smoothly in fact that deep down I knew somthing had to go wrong... anyway, setup seemed to complete without a hitch with XP on the 320gb array & Vista on the 500gb array, however on the final reboot which should have loaded Vista the PC froze with no error message.

After a couple minutes of no HD activity, I knew I was hosed so I hit reset& this time was greeted with a menu that looked like a dual-boot OS-selection screen, but the only choices were to load previous Windows version(XP) or to rollback Vista installation... the worst thing was that neither of these options worked & both only resulted in rebooting to the same screen... upon further examination it seems thst Vista setup somhow trashed my RAID array by combining the 2 seperate RAID 1's consisting of 2 drives each into 4 arrays consisting of one drive each (!!!) & had managed to corrupt the data they contained in the process.

Its not like I lost any data because I have 3 full backups on two external HD's & on another PC running XP Pro on RAID 0+1, but it certainly was a frustrating way to spend 3 hours only to end up restoring a backup image.

Needless to say I'm hesitant to try again until I at least have an idea of how the 2 seperate RAID 1 arrays were changed into 4 in the BIOS by Vista setup.... if anyone can help I'll be eternally greatful![/b]

[Grav!ty Profile]

Wow that's quite an experience Captante and fortunately you had the foresight to keep off system backups.

I'd suggest you try to run a clean install of Vista onto the system array and although it means reinstalling all your programs and then copying backed up data over, it may work.

During this attempt I would physically unplug the second array and then recreate it in your RAID configuration afterwards.

Of course this is only feasible to try if you are satisfied that your data is well backed up. If possible I'd suggest keeping non-image backups, at least for the drive you will try to install Vista on.

Do you think this can work?

There are still many unknowns about the use of Windows Vista in RAID arrays. It's just something MS gave scant and insufficient attention to during development and in Beta Testing in my opinion. Controller vendors are also responsible for the problems I guess and just did not come to the party with drivers to support RAID to the extent they could and should have.

[Captante Profile]

I know I could do that, but at this point I really still want to have XP Pro available to run games on my 8800GTX with the convience of dual-booting to Vista to do most other stuff. If it comes down to one or the other, I'll be holding off running Vista until the driver situation from Nvidia improves, but that wouldn't be my first choice.

The thing that really has me freaked out is I can't understand how Vista setup was able to override the Nv-RAID BIOS & trash the mirror array setups ... not being able to see the array at all I could understand, but this is just weird... my only thought is that somhow the MBR got screwed up & thats what caused it.

Do you think if I try installing VistaBootPRO in XP before starting the Vista setup, that might help, or is it likely the same thing will happpen?

[Grav!ty Profile]

I'm not quite clear on what you are wanting to do...maintain your XP installation on Array# 1 and install Vista on Array# 2? or maintain your XP installation and install Vista to a partition on Array# 1?

If you are going to use a 3rd party partition manager then it is strongly recommended that you only use it to create free space and use XP disk management to create the actual partition and format it.

In the case of the second option here, that should be fairly easy to achieve but again I would suggest unplugging Array# 2.

That Vista setup undid your RAID configuration astounds me too and you are probably right that it messed with your MBR

VistaBootPRO will have no effect during setup. It does not include a boot manager as such at this stage and is simply a utility to edit the BCD store. Prior to the store having been created by setup, it has no effect at all.

I'm very curious as to the outcome and what you decide on as being the best course of action for you.

[Captante Profile]

Hi again & sorry for not being clear, but ideally what I'd like to do is maintain XP on array #1 (320gb) & install Vista on array #2 (500gb) & maintain a dual-boot configuration with that setup, although as an alternative I would consider partitiioning array #1 & installing both OS's on it if you think its more likely to work.

Its really too bad VistaBootPro doesn't include a boot-manager that will work with Vista ... in fact unless I'm mistaken nobody does yet, although Acronis claims to be very close... please correct me if I'm wrong!

Thanks for trying to help though & I'll let you know what I decide to try.

[JabbaPapa Profile]

If I were you, I would pretty much follow Graham's line of thinking, with some variants --- his suggestion to physically unplug the second array during setup is a good one

The most likely explanation would be a RAID drivers issue, as Vista appears to be capable of handling your chipset.

However, due to the fact that you had this setup issue, IMO it would be wise to install Vista first, XP second (VistaBootPRO can be used from within XP to reinstall the Vista bootloader).

Make a floppy for your RAID drivers by copying the Vista drivers (if available) into the root of the floppy, or copy the contents of the Server 2003 folder inside your current drivers floppy into the root of a second floppy.

Run setup by booting from DVD ; as you will be unable to continue setup until you have working RAID drivers, this will be a good means of ensuring that your Vista software environment is working

Good luck !!

[JabbaPapa Profile]

And BTW, I think it would be preferable to run both XP and Vista from the same array --- when creating the partition during your first OS setup, just use half of the available space for whichever OS you install first

[Captante Profile]

As a minor update, I've been doing some more research & it appears that although Vista does currently have drivers for the AMD version of the Nvidia 590/570 SLI SATA controller, they DON"T have SATA-RAID drivers
for it available yet, at least that I can find... also since theres no "press F6"
option to load drivers manually during setup that I can find, how could I add them myself anyway assuming I can find them?

[Grav!ty Profile]

I see that on their site. Thats a bit weird. If you can find the drivers, then used the Load Drivers function at the page where you select the drive to install on. It replaces F6.

You could try to load the Windows XP ones. It should warn you if they are not usable.

[Captante Profile]

Interesting idea ... I have the XP RAID drivers right here on a floppy so maybe I'll just unplug the power cables from the XP array as you suggested & give it a try.

Also I did stumble upon a boot manager that claims to work with Vista & has an updated version released yesterday ... have any experience with a program called "BootIt NG""?

Link: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html[/url]

UPDATE: Asus appears to have a RAID driver for my motherboard which I'm going to try... all I can say is that at 46mb's I certainly hope loading it off of a flash-drive works!