ASUS Socket939 A8N-SLI Premium drivers are tiny programs that enable your Motherboard hardware to communicate with your operating system software.
IMy SATA Nvidia controlled RAID array crashed and I am trying to do a restore from a Disaster Recovery CD (DR-CD). It had been booting fine from the SATA Raid1 array and I installed the IDE drive for a backup device and did a backup to it. After the SATA became unmirrored I screwed it up by going to BIOS and deleted it and the PC would not boot. My DR-CD boots and does a temp install of XP but it sees the IDE drive as C: and the SATA Raid drive as and I installed XP to the partition. The problem comes when XP reboots, it does not boot from as I think it should but the C: IDE drive which has no boot files.
A long build up to a short question, how do I set up the BIOS to make the PC boot from the SATA RAID array and still be able to access the IDE drive? If I remove the IDE drive, everything works great and the PC boots from the temp XP and my backup software asks where the data file is located. I have the Boot priority set to SATA as first and the IDE as 2nd, but if the IDE is installed it always tries to boot from the IDE. Is it possible to get this thing to boot from the SATA Raid array? You'll need to save all the data from it wipe the drive and then disconnect it and then perform the DR Recovery without the IDE drive connected. You'll need a application like Boot & Nuke available here to do this as it will write zeros to every sector of the drive That way you'll be able to initialise the RAID and boot off that.
When you have the computer working to the way that you want reconnect the IDE Drive and format it up and copy your data back to it and it will be working as you had it previously. If you run the Install CD with an IDE Drive connected it becomes the C Drive and there are files written to it which are impossible to remove.
Thanks for the reply. I never did boot the IDE drive so I hope it is fine and the only place where my backup file is located. I guess there is no way around connecting the IDE and SATA drives and booting from the SATA?
It seems odd to me that even though the BIOS is set to boot from the SATA first, it tries to boot from the IDE. I read somewhere that there is a converter hardware that the IDE drive plugs into and it makes it into a SATA drive. Would this work in the future if I had 3 SATA drives in the PC? The restore DR-CD would see the SATA RAID array as C: and the converted IDE as and be able to retrieve data from the drive.
My problem is that my restore utility will not read an external USB drive so the drive must be in the PC hooked to a HDD controller. The DR-CD will install a temp XP so the utility can start a restore but the IDE drive cannot be in the PC or it tries to find the temp XP on it and not the SATA. Provided that you disconnect the IDE Drive before you run the Restore CD. Unfortunately an IDE Drive will always take precedence over a SATA Drive or Array and become the first boot device where the Windows Install Files are written to. If you look at the contents of the IDE Drive you should see a number string on it and there will be files in the Root that allow the SATA RAID to be recognised but unfortunately once you do any Restore with the IDE Drive connected you'll get this happening.
All you actually needed to do was disconnect the Power Lead to the IDE Drive and it would have been OK to Restore from the Recovery CD and you would have kept your drive letters as the same as well when you reconnected the IDE Drive. As for converters I'm not a big fan of them as I've had far more problems that they are worth from previous experience, even a USB to LAN converter has wasted the better part of a day and I eventually gave in and fitted a Network Card as it worked straight out of the packet and cost me far less in lost time that the attempt to get the USB Device to work.
Anyway you don't need to actually remove the IDE drive just disconnect the Power Lead when you do a recovery install and it will work the same as before then when you have the system loaded shut down plug back in the power lead and it will look exactly the same as when you originally added the IDE Drive. Thanks for the reply and let me pose another question. My problem is that when I boot from the restore CD the IDE must be powered down to install the temp files to the SATA array. When the install reboots I get a screen where it is asking where the BACKUP.NB7 file is located. Here is the problem. The file is on the IDE drive which is powered down.
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Can I plug in the IDE drive at this point with the PC still running? I can have the ribbon cable already connected but I thought the IDE drives were not hot swapable (is this the correct term?) and I would have to reboot and tell BIOS that the new drive was there. If I reboot with the DR-CD in the drive and the IDE installed, the whole process starts again and the temp files want to go to the IDE which is now C. I am using Novastor backup software which does not currently permit restores from an external USB drive which would solve all my problems. They say they are working on it, but I needed it yesterday. What you need to do is do a Rescue Install as outlined here With the IDE Drive Disconnected so that the correct files are written to the RAID Array and not to the IDE Drive.
After you perform the repair you'll then need to apply all the Service Packs & Patches that have become available since the product was originally released but you should keep all your Programs & Data Intact though you should remove everything from the IDE Drive just to be on the safe side and restore your data to it after it's been formatted. If you don't do this you run the risk of damaging the Windows Install and causing errors to crop up in the system.