ASUS P4R800 Deluxe Raid Setup

Hey all,

I was trying to build a friends machine today when I encountered an odd problem. I have the P4P800SE board which runs great; I told him to get the same. Instead, he gets the P4R800V Deluxe board. Apparently you have to have a raid setup in order for it to boot from a SATA drive..?? I got everything up and running just fine. When I tried to install WinXP Pro on his only drive (160GB Seagate SATA) it wouldn't detect it. The SATA diagnostic that runs at startup finds the drive, but the windows partition utility doesn't see it. I read something about copying the Raid drivers off of the ASUS CD-Rom and putting them on a floppy. During the XP install you hit F6 to install SCSI or Raid devices, which I did, and pointed it to the floppy, but it keeps causing some error...sorry I don't remember what the error is. According to ASUS and everything else I've seen, this should work, but it doesn't. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks,
-Seack

The CPU relevant specs:
ASUS P4R800-V Deluxe
Prescott P4 3.2GHz
1GB Dual Channel 433Mhz
Seagate 160GB Sata Drive
ATI 9600XT 256mb

Does it have the latest BIOS, and check to see if those files are the CD are the newest.

I looked on ASUS's website for BIOS updates. The latest update was from last november of last year. He just got the board from Newegg, so I would assume it has the lastest BIOS already on it. We sent the board back though, that is rediculous to have to do that. ASUS should send you a floppy with the drivers on it in the first place...especailly for a $100 dollar board.

Don't assume that, assume the opposite if your going to assume anything.

Also, the quality of floppy disk (and disk drive) manufacturing has seriously degraded over the years.

I get the same problem some times, keep trying. Eventually it works. If it just absolutely refuses, get a new floppy and try again. Try it repeatedly, again. If it still absolutely refuses. You may need a new floppy disk drive. Yes, even if its a brand new computer. Sometimes things ship defective. Thats life.

Save yourself the trouble of repeating the process though. Once you get it to work, and install the base operating system, IMAGE it!

Look at the original post date my friend

have i missed something... You stated only RAID set up on SATA works on that M/B.. RAID requires 2 identical drives to work..... From what you have said it seems that there is nothing wrong with the motherboard or RAID facility apart from the lack of a 2nd 160GB SATA HDD.. A RAID detection utility will detect any hard drives in the array but for raid to work you need 2 hard drives to start any partition.. If poss it may be beneficial using a PATA HDD on the system until a 2nd SATA can be found..
i hope this helps (its not meant to be patronising, im just confused as if i have missed something in what you said, if i have please feel free to shoot my reply out of the air)

By post date I mean the date that this thread was started. I posted this over a year ago, the problem has long since been solved (though I do apprecaite the input)