shsurury

Slipstream the drivers in your XP installation CD. I had similar problem with Promise RAID controller and no matter what I do it will not read the drivers from the floppy, but after a slipstream it just installs every thing without any problem. Search on this forum on how to slipstream drivers for your card. Hope this helps

I wrote to Asus with this issue and they got back to me with this "sir ,i also have tested like that . the result is similiar . Promise dc20378 has 2 sata ports and 1 IDE ports , the ide port can connect 2 IDE harddisk , you can use the 2 disks in raid0 or raid 1 mode ,but , due to the 2 disks are in same IDE channel , the disk ! performance will be very poor ,even a bit lower than single harddisk . if you use a sata harddisk to replace one ide disk, then use sata+pata disk as raid0 ,the disk performance is very high , almost double the single disk score . and you also know that ,the Seagate U5/U6 disk are all low cost low speed disk , so your disk performance is bad . i contacted the Promise before , they told my they don't recommend to build RAID0 on that only IDE port too" I guess I will try some other faster drives and see if it does the same. If not I will go for SATA drive as it has 2 seperate channels. By the way thank you very much for all your help ironfist241. Cheers shsurury

This is what happens when using the floppy option. The initial "F6" worked, and picked up the .INF files etc. I could choose the "Promise FastTrack 376/378" storage device to add support for. The system goes and loads all the drivers it thinks it needs, prints "Starting Windows", gets me to choose F8 to accept, selects the partition to install to (So I CAN see the device), and then goes into the "Insert the disk" loop.

Thanks ironfist241 When I first started installing XP on raid I had tried the floppy method but XP would not take my drivers from the floppy no matter what I do. That is the reason I went for the slipstreaming method. Is there any way to ascertain if the RAID controller is faulty. I dont know if I am still in the warenty period as I bought this motherboard last year. I will have to check. I have even downgraded my motherboard bios to see if that helps but with no luck. Any help will be highly appreciated. shsurury

Hello ironfist241, I checked the drive using segate disk diagnostic tool and I found no errors on both the disk. I did both the quick test as well as comphrensive tests, but no error and both passed. The average transfer rate in the test for DMA mode was between 65-75MB/s in the diagnostics. At the time of booting it displays the fastrak utility as follows: Fasttrak 378 Bios Version 1.00.0.37 © 2003 Promise Technologies, Inc All rights reserved ID Mode Size Track Mapping State 1 2+0 Stripe 40040M 4868/255/63 Functional Press Ctr+f to enter the utility................ I have checked the RAID utility and the RAID is defined correctly It says Array No. RAID Mode Total Drv Capacity State 1 Stripe 2 40040M Functional Stripe Block = 16KB Gigabyte Boundry= off any more ideas. I just dont know what I am doing wrong Please help. shsurury

Hello, I am new to this forum. I have been trying to Install XP Pro SP2 on a RAID 0 (2+0) and it takes atleast 2-3 hrs to install. After installing when I do a benchmark on Sis Sandra 2005 I get an average read/write speed of 16MB/s. Am I doing some thing wrong. Firstly my system configeration is as follows: Motherboard: Asus P4P800-E Deluxe with Promise Fasttrak 378 Raid Controller with Fastrak 378 RAID Bios 1.00.0.37 with motherboared BIOS P4P8E007 CPU: P4 3.0GHZ Prescot RAM Kingston 256MB x 2 DDR 3200 as paired Harddisk: 2 x Seagate U Series 5 on RAID 0 with 1.00.1.37 Fasttrak 378 drivers, set as master/slave on single RAID controller Model Number:ST320413A Capacity: 20.02 GB Speed:5400 rpm Average Seek Time:9.9 ms Buffer: 512KB 1x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV as Master on Primery IDE Model Number:ST340016A Capacity:40 GB Speed:7200 rpm Seek time:9 ms avg Interface:Ultra ATA/100 Buffer: 2MB 1x IBM IC35L040AVVN07-0 as slave on Primery IDE Speed: 7200 rpm Size: 40 GB Buffer: 2MB 1x Pioneer DVR 109 as master on Secondary IDE Graphic Card: Geforce FX5200 128Mb graphics. Firstly I slipstreamed the above RAID driver to my Win XP pro sp2 CD. Then I selected the Promise RAID 378 controller in the BIOS as RAID then selected the CDROM as my first boot drive. I then rebooted the computer and waited till the Fastbuild utility appear and pressed ctr-f to get in the utility. I the created a RAID 0 (2+0) with 16kib stripe block. once i create the RAID i start the process of installing Win XP Pro. I get the start up screen then it askes if I want to press F6 to load other drivers. I leave it as it is and allow the windows driver to load. I press F8 to accept the licence agreement and I notice one drive. (I havent connected my other drives on the IDE controller yet). I sellect it and allow it to formate in NTFS. Then it loades all the files and restart. All is well. Now from here it takes atleast 2-3 hrs to install XP. After installing XP I run a Sis Sandra 2005 hard disk test and it gives me an average read/write of 16MB/s. which is wey below the value I got for my single 40GB harddrive (30MB/s). Can any one be able to help me with this, Any help will be highly appreciated Thanks in advance shsurury