Hard drive will not act as bootable ??

[vBMechanic]

System:
PC with XP Pro
1 IDE RAID of 2 hard drives, used to be C: drive
1 IDE hard drive, used to be D: drive for storage / backup
Fasttrak TX 2000 IDE Raid controller

After wrestling with some worms, I decided to just do a format and clean install. I backed up my data to my spare hard drive and used an XP Pro bootable CD to install.

The setup booted to the CD mis-identified my drives using the IDE as C and the RAID as D. The RAID should be the main hard drive, and the IDE should be backup.

Either way, I didn't have much choice so I proceded with the install. I partitioned the RAID and let XP format it then install to the WINDOWS directory.

Everything went OK except the RAID will not act as a bootable drive. The drive management tool identifies the IDE C drive as "System" and the RAID D drive as "Boot" drive.

When the startup BIOS routine happens, it says:

Searching for Boot Sector on RAID ... OK

Boot failure from previous device...

Booting from IDE ... OK

The system will boot from the IDE or from the Windows CD if I leave it in the CD Rom. It will not boot from the RAID.......

How can I make the RAID my drive C again and make it bootable?

Thanks!

[Play_The_0dds]

could be a boot virus or a corrupted mbr, you can low level packet write the drives(secure erase) what ever you want to call it it means zero the drive, erase all partitions and write zeros. even if you delete partitions with wiondows tools and recreate and format you can still have issues with corruption or boot viruses. have also seen leftover boot info cause the same thing.

[GSM Super Star]

When Installing windows did you use the manufactures Drivers for the HD. You have to press F6 when the Setup is loading all the drivers and it will ask you for the disk.

Sorry I cant be anymore help

[vBMechanic]

Thanks for the advice.. I was using the manufacturer's RAID drivers. The problem was that there was no way for me to specify that I wanted the RAID as C and the IDE as D.

I decided to just re-format and re-install again. This time, I removed the IDE from BIOS-- and after doing that, Windows recognized the RAID as C and the IDE as D during setup... therefore placing the boot sector correctly on the RAID.

Before doing that, I tried Recovery / Fixboot and FixMBR with no luck. Now everything seems peachy with no errors or worms.

[GSM Super Star]

Ok Cool. Glad everything is working fine