How muh trouble am I in?

[walwood]

When I boot and go into the bios I can see that my IDE Primary Master and Primary Slave are set to None. When I try to change through IDE HDD Auto Detection the value comes back as none.

Continue boot and the machine looks like it is scanning the drives and says as much. Go into the Fastbuild utility and choose Auto Set-up and I get "no available disks!" but when I go into drive array is shows 160gb and a status of functional.

I have had the back of the machine of an checked all connections.

Anybody got an idea ?

[BipolarBill]

First off, you're looking in Standard CMOS Setup for drives that are actually mounted in a RAID array. You'll never see the array in BIOS setup, so forget that. The Promise controller is your drive BIOS.

Secondly, you're not telling us all we need to know. Have you set up Windows yet? Have you FDISKed and formatted your array? Which version of Windows are you hoping to use? If it's Win2K/XP, you have to press F6 when setup begins and load the Promise drivers when prompted later in Setup.

[BipolarBill]

Oh - if you plan on booting from the array, you have to set the boot sequence in BIOS appropriately. I believe that the Promise array should appear there as "BBS-0". It may also be "SCSI".

[walwood]

Sorry for providing all I should, I wasn't aware of what I needed to and am no expert. Here is the whole saga

This machine is a Intel P4 3ghz with 1gb ram and 160gb hdu with XP home edition. It is 6 months old and was running ok except for a few screen freezes after XP booted. Checks of the cause of freeze pointed to a Radeon Series 9800 driver issue which I would duly update from the manufacturer. The issue never fully went away but it was bearable.

One week ago on boot I got the "Windows failed last time" etc and tried all the options "safe mode" "last known config" "safe mode" but all of the froze on the loading of a file called agp440.sys file.

Extensive research said I need to re-install XP so I went to the bios, change the first boot device to CD and threw in a copy of XP. When I got the action window asking what I wanted I initially asked for console to see if I could fix and got some message like "NO HDD disks" and when I went for full installation I got the same.

That's when I realised I had big issues and needed help. I am just an ordinary Joe that uses his PC for film editing and email. I am no expert.

Any other information I can supply?

[BipolarBill]

Here's where I say that a RAID 0 array is not worth the trouble or expense. OK - that's out of the way.

The array is probably corrupted. If you can afford to lose your data, I would break the array in the FastBuilid utility, move the drives to the onboard IDE controllers and use one drive for your stuff and then use Ghost to back up that drive to the other one regularly.

If you have data on the array that you cannot afford to lose, you will need to buy something like this:

http://www.r-tt.com/RStudio.shtml

Still, when it's all said and done, you're better off with RAID 1 or no RAID at all because RAID 0 is much too fragile for anyone who cannot afford to lose the data on it.