RAID % and XP Installation problems

[BernardStewart]

have a workstation running XP Pro in a multi-boot set up.
The hardware is ASUS A7NX8 motherbooard. The disk configuration is as follows: two 80Gb EIDE drives as drives C&D (both with XP Pro loaded) and four 40Gb drives on a Promise RAID controller card with RAID 5 split into multiple partitions with XP Pro installed into RAID drive Partition E.

The setup was configured to boot first into the RAID XP installation so the motherboard BIOS was set to boot options floppy=1, SCSI=2, CDROM=3.

The problem was that for no apparent reason the XP installation on the RAID drive literally trashed (no apparent reason or cause). I would boot in safe mode but no other. It also had lost all the carefully set sysstem restore points!. I tried doing a repair installation and that did not work. I have had to do a rewipe and total reinstall. All OK so far except that it cannot now boot directly into the RAID XP with the BIOS settings as given. When I try I get the error "NTLDR is missing".

The only way I can boot into the XP raid is by setting the bios HDDO=1. This means that it is relying on the EIDE C drive to be present and then will boot into the RAID XP having used the boot.ini file on the C drive to see the RAID system. Since the C&D drives are swappable backup disks I don't want this.

Any ideas how I can get it to boot directly to the RAID drive?
Why doesn't the XP installation insttall the needed boot files to the RAID partition?

Unfortunately my tech expert who built this for me has retired and moved abroad!

Any help would be much appreciated

[Gabriel]

I will try to shed some light on your problem.
Windows NT (XP 2000 whatever) sees disks as ARC naming. the C: , D: E: naming is only for us - humans.
When the system starts the boot sector is redirecting you to a boot file - Boot.ini. on the boot.ini file the naming is something like this
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="your beloeved operation System" /fastdetect

Multi - the ordinal number (starting with zero) of the controller (if you have SCSI with no BIOS enables you have to state SCSI based arc naming which is somewhat different)
Disk - the ordinal number (starting with zero) of the disk
Partition - the ordinal number (starting with one) of the partition which contains the boot and system files.

You have to set it correctly.

for more information
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;102873


More - Your Windows installation HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer - not the legendary computer from Space Odissy...) has to have "DRIVER" to "speak" with your storage device.

also look here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/...mDays=&InCC=on

Cheers and hope I helped you,
Gabriel