Help! My system is messing with my head.

I've got 4 IBM/Hitatchi drives of 2 standards ~40Gb that I want to put in RAID 1 with my ABIT KD7-Raid for obvious reasons but they won't play fair:

I tried to install windows XP from fresh on Raid 1, all went fine until Installed my Soundblaster Audigy 2 drivers then on reboot - Stuffed due to errors in the system folder that were unrecoverable! I tried this in various ways 6 times before I ran our of hair to pull out.

I then decided to try running windows SP form 1 drive and using 2 in Raid 1 with Mp3s, documents, games etc - I can do with the write preformance loss since I get a bonus on the read speed.
BUT
I started with just 2 drives and got it running nicely then put the 3rd drive in Raid with the data drive. Result? I can listen to MP3s but my games won't run. Tried a bit of retro starcraft as my first install onto the array and it won't start. Neither will Dawn of war and thats brand new and was mirrored over from the 1st data drive.

Oh and scandisk hates checking the raid drive it throws out lots of errors.

Eventually I pulled the plug on the backup the data ran ok.

I'm getting annoyed and no-one seem to have this problem. Any ideas?
Oh and I even upgraded my PSU from 350W ennermax to 480W antec truepower as sometimes drives dissappeared on boot when I had all 4 running for the 1st month.

Spec:
2500+ Barton, 512Mb Twinmos Ram, Abit KD7-R, Asus DVD, Optirite DVDR, Soundblaster Audigy 2, Hauppauge WinTV, 480w antec trupower, ATI r9660pro

Any raid pimpes out there to help out???

j1m8ot: is this a hardware or software raid config?? if a software, that may be why xp does not like it is because there are memory issues with XP and raiding..if hardware: im not sure why you'd be able to lsiten to mp3s, but not play games...will have to do some research..

Quote: Originally Posted by CubanConnectionZ Any raid pimpes out there to help out???

does this post really need to be here, or you just trying to up your post count??

High point hardware raid, onboard Abit KD7 mb.
Tried to run warhammer from CD, from desktop icon and from the program in the folder. Strangely it runs the setup system though. I'm gonna reinstall it.

I'm running SP2. but the original problem of not taking windows installation was with SP1 install from CD.

Why are you mirroring 4 drives? Just curious...


Are you using the current drivers for your highpoint chip? Is there a BIOS available for your board?

Quote: Originally Posted by pimp joose Why are you mirroring 4 drives? Just curious... Are you using the current drivers for your highpoint chip? Is there a BIOS available for your board?

I've got the newest bios for the raid and the newest "stable bios for the MB (abit put out a bios that wouldn't post with Barton so I had to step back an issue)

I'm running windows from 1 drive, no mirroring, storing data/games on a second with a mirror which won't work properly and the 4th isn't plugged in yet.

I've put all the drives on cable select as i read that may be a problem. reinstalled dawn of war and it crashes at random points in the intro video, so far no word from the company.

why 4 drives? 2 failed drives in 18 month. 1 bought to replace while 1 on RMA return. Bought the second pair cos they'd got sooooo cheap and because I could try raid.

Update: I was loading some digital photos onto the array and found that many of them were corrupted or totally unreadable! So much for Raid 1 security, my photos are ruined I split the array, obviously both copies are identically stuffed.

I tried Abit FAQ, nothing on my problem specifily