cant reformat HDDs

I have 2 120g HDDs with raid0 set up using the raid software I got with my mobo.

The only partition shown in the table is a 240mb partition(?)

Wondering where is the partition I made when I set up the raid config and installed windows?

I made only 1 large partition using the combined drives.

When i select this 240mb partition for windows to reinstall on, I says:

"your computer's startup program cannot access this partition. Windows cannot be installed on this HDD"

any help would be appreciated.

 

[too late to edit]

The 240mb partition it was detecting was a thumb drive I had plugged into a USB port.lol

When I attempt to reformat and reinstall windows, setup finds no HDDs!

Do I need to start by reconfiguring my raid setup????? maybe use my raid disk to repartition and reformat the HDDs????

 

I do not know too much about setting up a raid config but I do know somthing about cables, somtimes they suck. If you have another set lying around you may want to try them while you're waiting for wiser sage advice. I had a bad ide cable earlier this year (what really stunk is I also had a bad stick of ram--both new out of the box too!)

hope it helps and good luck
Destructo

 

Did you make sure to put the drivers for the RAID controller onto a floppy and load them at the very beginning of the Windows install process when it says something like, "Press F6 to install third party SCSI or RAID drivers"? If you don't do this, your RAID drive just won't show up.

 

I did this when I 1st set up the raid array. Do I need to do this again to reformat?

I guess I'll throw my floppy drive back in and use the raid utility to reformat. I would have thought after getting the BIOS to recognize the HDD's as a raid array the first time I formatted them, it would still be seeing it.

thx guys

 

"I did this when I 1st set up the raid array. Do I need to do this again to reformat?"

Now you lost me. You shouldn't need to 'reformat'. When you set up the RAID array, you may (or may not, I don't know) have the option to format. Do or don't, doesn't matter. As long as you set up the array, and create a partition, Windows will be able to format it. (although this can take a while so you'll probably want to do it in the RAID setup if possible)

But in any case you'll need to load the RAID drivers during the windows install. If you don't do this, it will do exactly what you are describing.

 

when I set up the raid the 1st time and formatted the new HDDs, after using the raid utility to make one big partition out of the 2 drives, I used the windows setup program to format the partition and install windows.

only now, windows setup does not see the drives, so i cant choose the partition to format.

I have an option to "quick format" the partition in the raid utility(f4 during boot on my bios)

I also have the options to delete and create a raid array(this would partition the drives for me i think)

I can start at the beginning and go through the RAID setup if i need to. I just have to put my floppy drive back in first.

I cant understand why I would have to remake the partition and screw around with raid configs when I just want to format the partition that should already be there.

 

You DON'T have to remake the partition... However, in order for us to provide help, you do need to confirm that you are pressing F6 at the beginning of the Windows install and loading the RAID drivers from your floppy disk. Once you do this, we can proceed...