I bit the bullet, I’ve bought 2 new 160Gb Maxtor hard-drives. They now form a SATA Raid array, somewhere in the region of 300Gb (after all the NTFS formating overheads.) I got them on Friday, delivered to work so I thought I’d spend Saturday morning, installing them and MS Windows.

Easy, how hard can installing a pair of drives as a raid array be?

So when I got in form work on Friday night, I took the old PATA drives out of my pc and began. Here’s a little spec for you:

  • MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
  • AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice core)
  • 1Gb Corsair ValueSelect memory (2X512Mb)

The Motherboard has 4 SATA connectors on it so I thought, Ok, first SATA drives I’ve owned so I’ll put them on SATA channels 1 & 2.

I spent a couple of minutes looking through the BIOS to enable raid, but no problems there it was (eventually.) I then re-started the computer and hit F10 when necessary to build the array.

First glitch.

The BIOS (or raid software, I’m not sure which) froze just after I selected the array type and which drives to have in the array. Strange, I thought, so I rebooted and tried again, same thing happened. so I thought maybe it’s building the array and, given the size of the drives, this may take time.

So I got a coffee, came back and it was in the same state. So I rebooted again, checked back and the array checked as healthy.

Yeay for me, it’s working. I made it the boot device and again it hung. Another reboot and the boot setting is active. So windows here I come!

Second glitch.

Windows installer hangs. I’ve loaded the raid drivers and everything is proceding as it should be but at the ‘Starting Windows Setup’ point it freezes. At this point it’s getting late on Friday night, so I thought I’d get some sleep and try again on Saturday.

Saturday morning, about 7.30am I try to install Windows again. Same thing. At nine a good friend comes over, bringing a 10 channel mixing desk and midi keyboard for me, yeay new toys, but no Windows to try them with.

So we have a coffee and discuss the problem, 2 heads being better than 1…

To cut a (very) long story short, we did spend most of Saturday trying things, the main problem is the motherboards nForce3 chipset. Little did we know that SATA ports 1 & 2 are pointless, they cause conflicts.

So now I have a raid array but I’ve had to turn off my 2 network ports in BIOS and in stall a PCI network card.

So repeat after me, only use SATA ports 3 & 4 on a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum…