[Aaron]

I'm having trouble trying to format 2 striped drives in a RAID0 array from Windows XP or 2003 Setup, as it errors out saying its a damaged drive halfway through. I've been told that it should be formatted individually before putting them into a RAID array (its my first time doing RAID btw, on a 2 year old mobo).

So instead of swapping the cables back into the plain IDE slot in order to format them, I was thinking if it was possible to use Windows PE to format the drives as NTFS while its in a RAID array. But the question is if it has the necessary RAID drivers or not. And would it be easy to integrate?

[Blyster]

Quote

I've been told that it should be formatted individually before putting them into a RAID array

I have never heard this or experienced it. I've taken OEM drives that aren't formatted and placed them in a RAID configuration and then formatted the RAID group with no problems. Could it possibly be a corrupted driver?

Blyster

[Aaron]

I know, its really odd. The RAID array appears to be functional according the the Promise FastTrack configuration screen. It could be a bad driver (i'll try remaking another floppy). The drivers came from here. The ones I originally had on floppy seem to be corrupted and only has windows 2000 drivers.

Anyway, if I use WinPE and format from there, then I will at least be able to skip formatting by choosing the "leave filesystem as it is" option during Windows Setup

[Blyster]

These are the same Fasttrak 100 Lite ™ drivers that ASUS supplies for the A7V266-E motherboard (which i have). I know that the drivers work with 2k/xp. Hopefully it is just that the drivers got corrputed. One other thing you could try is destoying the RAID group that you have made and then remake it

Blyster

[Aaron]

I've looked in the plugins folder for Bart's PE and it includes a template on how to add your own promise fasttrack driver, which I'm going to do tomorrow, as well as try out another floppy. It looks hopeful, but I'll have to get some sleep now, its been a busy and frustrating day with all this raid business.

[XtremeMaC]

i had a problem with formatting, not a raid drive
I couldn't format it through windows
I booted up with recovery and formatted from there...

after that same problem consisted through windows. so I created a 8mb primary hidden partition before the rest of the hdd. everything is working fine.. though I've got to that point b4 trying billions of things. I dunno if that applies to your situation.. (I had lost my fat table of contents.) ...

I dunno if it helps