Dual boot problem with FC4, XP, SATA, RAID

landroverlady · 03-08-2006, 05:59 AM

I think I may have rendered my XP RAID unbootable. Help!
I had 2 320GB Western Digital SATA drives set up in a RAID 1 configuration (nForce3 250gb chipset)and decided to add a 120GB WD SATA drive with FC4 as a dual boot with the FC4 drive as my boot drive. Originally when booting, all I got was "rootnoverify (hd1,0)" and "chainloader +1" on the screen when attempting to boot into XP. I tried several different things with GRUB such as adding "map (hd1) (hd0)" and "map (hd0) (hd1)" to GRUB to no avail. I have also booted with the 320GB drives removed from the array and tried to boot to only one hard drive from the XP cd using "fixmbr" and "fixboot" and/or "fixboot c:" with no results. I have also tried using a Knoppix live CD to rescue data from the XP SATA drives. Knoppix "sees" the RAID array, but the drives show to be unformatted. Any ideas on how to get back into the XP drives or even one of the drives out of the array? It appears I am learning the hard way that FC4, XP, RAID, & SATA do not go together. Anybody have any ideas? Thank you in advance for any ideas you may offer.

Landroverlady

Athlon64 3000+
1GB Mushkin PC3200
Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR motherboard
ATI Radeon 9800 video
nVidia nForce3 250GB chipset
2 320GB Western Digital SATA (XP Pro)
1 120GB Western Digital SATA (FC4)
onboard sound and nic

Gethyn · 03-08-2006, 04:49 PM

Have you got a driver floppy disk for the RAID/motherboard? If so, try loading that when you boot from the XP CD, then try fixmbr again.

landroverlady · 03-09-2006, 08:41 PM

Thank you! I appreciate your suggestion, but it didn't work. fixmbr says it has written a new master boot record, but when I do fixboot, or fixboot c: it says that fixboot cannot find the system drive or the drive specified is not valid. Any other ideas? Do you think it would work to break the array and only do this to one SATA drive?
Do you think it would do any good to add the single SATA drive back to the mix and reinstall a version of Linux?
I am so at a loss on this. Any suggestions are really appreciated.
Landroverlady

Gethyn · 03-10-2006, 06:52 AM

RAID 1 is mirrored? In that case, I guess you could try taking out the second RAID drive temporarily re-installing the MBR on the first drive. I've always avoided RAID though, so am not the person to give advice about it!