HELP please with hard drives cant boot

[turtle3]

Hi guys I am desperately in need of help, I was reinstalling windows and decided to format my hard drive partition when I was offered the option at the start of the windows install. my hard drives are 2 250gig seagate barracudas set up in raid, just as the format was near completion I get the message that format could not be completed due to error. I rebooted and now windows will not load up, I get an ''error cannot read from drive'' message and says '' pres ctrl alt delete to reboot'', which if I do ends up with the same result again? I can boot from cdrom using my windows xp disc which takes me to the windows hard disk partition screen and this is what it reads:

238473 mb disk 0 at id 0 on bus atapi [mbr]

C: Partition 1 [ntfs] 238465 mb (237889 free)
unpartitioned space 8mb

238473 mb disk 0 at id 0 on atapi [mbr]

D: partition 1 [unknown] 238465 mb (238464 free)

I havnt got a clue what to do now I have tried installing windows on the C: partition and it seems to complete it but then when Windows reboots I get the ''cannot read from drive error'' again

Please if anyone can guide me through this I would be extremely gratefull thanks

 

[PsychoDuck]

Are your drives in raid 0 or raid 1? Are they listed as being in a raid set in your raid controller BIOS? Not sure why you are getting two drive letters because if they are in raid you should only have a single letter as long as they are set up correctly on your raid controller and you pressed F6 at the beginning of the windows set-up and installed the raid controller drivers.

 

[turtle3]

Thanks, in the raid utility array list it says:

boot- yes ID-1 Status-Healthy vendor nvidia array model name stripe 465.77

Does this help?

I used my Packard bell restore disc again and it semed to install but then on bootup it gets to the windows logo and now locks up??

Thanks

 

[_Jimlad_]

don't you need the raid drivers before you start?

 

[PsychoDuck]

I still dont understand if in the windows pre-installation part where it lists your drives why you have two drive letters listed there. If your drives are properly configured in raid they should show as a single drive. What I would do is go into your raid controller BIOS and remove both drives from the raid set and then re-add them. Then boot off of your windows cd, when asked if you wish to install a 3rd party controller press F6 and insert your raid controller disc. This should then give you just one drive listed which you can partition and format as necessary.

 

[PsychoDuck]

Forgot to say that breaking the raid set if you are using raid 0 will lose all of your data.

 

[turtle3]

Thanks for the help Pduck, I havnt sorted it yet seems like my hard drive has failed, every time I try to instal windows it fails and says corrupted hard drive, got an engineer coming out on monday luckily this pc was under warranty, just got to put everything back to standard so he cant say my warranty is void, lol. Hopefully see you on the battlefield on ocuk v 50, I cant wait,,