Installed bootable raid 0, Now original drives have lost letter assignments

[eluv8]

First time post, here it goes. I own a asus p4t533/pa motherboard with the promise lite 133 bios or something like that, First I set up the computer with a wd 120 gig hard drive as the primary drive with a maxtor 40 gig slave drive jumpered as such on a 80 pin cable. Windows xp pro assigned letters c and d to the drives. Here is my goal, I want to boot from raid and install a fresh copy of windows xp pro,current install has been beat to death with viruses, spyware, and malware programs, and retain my data on the original c and d drive. I intend to later transfer my data over to the raid array and then reformat the drives and start fresh.I am assuming there is no way of transfering the user installed programs without doing a ghost and copying all data over including corrupted windows install and drivers. Here is what I have done and the results thus far. I installed 1 40 gig drive jumpered as master on each end of the 2 raid cables and enabled bios to boot from raid, set up the array and hit f6 during windows install and installed current drivers. windows finished installing and it booted into windows, all appeared to be well. Once in windows I realized my original c and d drives were not listed in my computer, I checked disk manager and they are there but with no letter assignments. I had hoped windows would reassign the letters but unfortunatly no dice. I changed the boot sequence back to boot from the eide and system booted up just as before and c and d were back in my computer, and all files visable, I was able to enable raid and the drive was lettered g. All worked well except the fact that I was not able to boot from Raid. I was thinking it was a boot record thing but why wouldnt the d drive be visible, I dont boot from that drive in the original setup. I also thought it might be a jumper issue and so I tried different jumper settings master, cable select, with the original drives c and d but still no changes. I am new to raid and changing boot drives so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[daveyp225]

I am new to raid too, and haven't completed the installation yet, but it is my understanding that all drives in ANY raid array have to be the same capacity and *should* be the same exact drive (capacity, cache, rotational speed). Your raid array of the 40g HD and 120g HD should be wrong, according to my undertsnading of RAID.-

Also, if you had a RAID 0 array, the drives you had in the array would be listed as ONE drive..

[eluv8]

raid array is set up with 2 40 gig maxtor 8 cache 7200 rpm drives,raid 0 and running great, the 120 and 40 gig drives are on the primary ide of the motherboard as master and slave, I just changed the jumpers to cable select but still no difference when booted from raid. the 120 and 40 are not in a array setup and work fine if system booted from the 120. I have noticed that the 120 and 40 gig drives are recognized with master boot records in disk management. Dont know if that is effecting. I am going to try and disconnect the 120 and reformatt drive d and see what happens. sorry for the unclear post, by the way nice overclock davey 2.8 up to 3.5 not bad at all. After reading my own post, I wonder if I changed the drives over to the secondary ide if that would change anything, Ill have to do that when I have time to pull the thing apart again. At this point for me its just trial and error, sure would be nice to get some posts from somebody with some experience with this stuff. Thanks again

[eluv8]

norton go back was installed on the system and has some sort of a drive lock function, uninstalled norton go back and all drives are now visible.

[diver203_98]

I have been through the ASUS website, and I can't find your particular motherboard. Can you look again and make sure of the board numbers. I am trying to find it so I can see what the specs are. As you can see in my sig, I am running RAID "1". And you are correct both drives *MUST* be the same size, or the system will only show the capacity of the smaller drive. But I am still unclear as to what you are trying to do with the IDE drives. The best thing to do is disconnect the IDE drives till you get the RAID setup and running, as that may allow your install to go through.

[diver203_98]

I found what I think is your Motherboard. ASUS P4T533. According to ASUS the RAID jumpers are set by default to RAID, and should cover pins "1" and "2", and those jumpers are by the IDE RAID connectors. The primary IDE RAID connector is "Blue" Secondary is "Black", so you will want to install 1 drive on each.Also make sure the cables are installed correctly. RED stripe to PIN #1. If you are looking at your motherboard, the #1 pin is to the bottom left (towards the PCI slots). Also you want to check in the BIOS, Boot order menu. Your IDE RAID might be under "Other Boot Devices".

*EDIT* I just reread your first post. If you are trying to use RAID you will need BOTH drives connected if you are going to use RAID "0" ALSO, have you read chapter starting with 5.10 "Using The Promise Chip For RAID Zero Or One"? You should read this section of your Motherboard manual.