P-6831 FX RAID 0 woes

ok so i just bought an identical drive to run my FX on RAID 0.
I thought the imaging process would be pretty easy as i have done with countless other laptops. this is not the case with this one.
I created an image using norton 2003 and norton 2008 of the original drive
and reimaged it to the new RAID setup and it wont boot. first error is about winload.exe. Ran Vista startup repair and it detected the error and corrected it. the next reboot, it got BSOD. Tried booting in safe mode and noticed that it BSOD right after loading crcdisk.sys. I guess it has something to do with my sata driver. Anyway, just out of curiosity i deleted the raid setup and reimaged the first drive with the backup image. First boot got an error but the a single vista startup repair fixed it. Tried reimaging again to the RAID setup but the same thing happens. I kinda like to believe i just need to get the right sata driver.. but which one? Weird thing is, If i do a clean install of vista with the RAID setup, everything works fine using the same sata drivers!
has anyone has the same problems as mine and made it work? Please help!

 

It probably is because you don't have the RAID driver loaded for windows. It's not the standard sata driver....search for the intel matrix storage manager (the complete install should include the correct driver...although installing it and not having a RAID array present might not make it stick)

Honestly I'd just do a fresh install anyway to get rid of bloatware. If you know enough about ghosting you can surely reinstall windows!

Hope that helps

 

as i have posted, i have already done a clean install and it works. I have always preferred doing clean installs over ghosting. this time around, it was more of a challenge to me. I wanted to know why it failed and how to fix it. I am using the same computer now using the original image but not in RAID 0 mode. It seems vista and ghost does not go well as the winload.exe has been a common error after reimaging.
A simple startup repair does the trick.
It's a different story with the RAID 0. I have loaded all the sata and RAID drivers and still wont work. startup repair cant fix it and ultimately leads to a 0x0000007c bsod.

I have read some stories about Acronis True Image being the culprit with "snapman" and i thought that would be it because I also tried acronis but it's a PITA to use. Disk access time with my 1TB My Book is terrible with both Acronis and Ghost 2003. Best result so far is using BartPE with Ghost 2008. Imaging only takes around 40 mins for an 80gig data compared to using acronis which takes at around 6hours to several days according to the estimated time. Issue with Dos based Ghost 2003 is weird -- the USB drive tend to work for 10 mins, then idles 5 mins, resumes disk access.
I will post back when I ultimately finds a solution. I'm going to try sector to sector imaging now. I used the default settings before.

 

I had this exact same problem too. This is how to fix:

Before you image run the following commands from a command prompt in Vista:

bcdedit /set {current} osdevice boot
bcdedit /set {current} device boot
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot

These stop winload.exe from looking for the unique drive that it was installed on previously

Re-reading your post though I'm not sure that will completely fix your problem. Are you imaging a non-raid image onto a raid setup?

 

After you setup a raid 0, is it normal on bootup to set the raid option screen? My systems are running great, I am just wondering what a normal bootup should be with a raid 0 setup, with a clean install of vista.
I see;
the sys/memory check screen
raid setup
some other screen that is realy fast
then vista load screen

 

Yeah that's right. You lose the BIOS OEM Gateway screen when Raid is enabled so you can see the config options.

 

Ok, cool, so everything is great, now its time to game

 

Thanks for the tip. I fixed the winload error using Vista startup repair. Yes i am imaging a non-raid image onto a raid setup.

I disabled RAID in BIOS and ran at AHCI mode. Imaged the drive. Got winload error, fixed it. worked fine. Just out of curiousity, I went to BIOS and enabled RAID but did not create a RAID disk and got the same BSOD similar to my problem with the RAID setup. If i disable RAID in BIOS again, the sytem boots up fine. I am beginning to believe that atc9001 is right about the RAID drivers. My problem now is how to install the RAID drivers ? I tried Vista repair, loaded the ICH8M-E RAID AHCI driver during the startup repair process -- loaded fine but still BSOD when booting. Anyone know how to do this the right way?