Win XP SATA RAID Driver Install - A Rant

[Xzin]

Installed a faulty set of codec driver on my XP system so I could make you all some movies. Which happens to be raided, software raid system, which complicates things 10 fold. Windows Media Player is useless - it can't load anything and the major codec packs screw up VLC and other movie players. Why is this so hard? Open source programs can encode and decode with standard libraries.

Anyway, issues I have faced:

Can't boot safe mode to restore at a restore point.
No other booting mode works (VGA, safe, last known good, etc).
Recovery console does not allow system restore to be run (mostly - you can hack a registry swap though).
Recovery console will not work without f6 raid drivers installed.
F6 drivers fails with a txtsetup.oem message.
BartPE does not work (loads to desktop but no menus, nothing).
Linux can (after much work) mount the striped drives in read only mode.
Linux ntfs-3g can theoretically mount said drives with write mode enabled but cannot do so because the NTFS volume was not shut down tidily (had to hard power off as system is non responsive).
Cannot repair the volume without it being unmounted.
Cannot mount volume in write mode without the errors being fixed. (Nice, huh). This CAN be fixed if I can chkdsk the drive... but in order to do that I need to F6 the drivers first..... *sigh*
Cannot fix the errors on one stripe but not the other else I risk data loss.

I *CAN* read the drive as the data is clearly still there.

Next step - attempt to get F6 and recovery console loaded, manually over write the registry hives and remove the faulty drivers. Then hope XP boots and manually fix the issue. Other options: copy all of the files and create a VM then reinstall XP and copy old files back and / or fix the F6 problem and manually restore the registry and / or create a slipstreamed version of XP with the raid drivers already loaded (http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=20748) and hope that a manual registry repair is successful.

A bit of a rant and not really multiboxing related but even with hardware raid these same issues crop up. Why can't Microsoft make it easier to slip stream their install disks? Linux at least can (with some fiddling) read and write NTFS volumes. Just not RAIDED NTFS volumes (although... there HAS to be a way to do this... how else would you dual boot on a striped raptor system)?

If any of this made sense and I have not managed to fix it tonight.. please share your insights :) I know i can fix this, even if I have to DD the entire drive, manually pick out the files and reinstall windows, then restore. I just don't want to have to spend the next 3 hours doing that :)

[deadarcher]

oh god, don't get me started on win xp and raid drivers. ive spent many-a-day fucking with it, ending up no where..usually on an nvidia board.

but like you said, chkdsk is great and it works to repair the drive.

what i usually do is just pop those bad drives into an xp system that works (or maybe an extra system lying around and run bartpe off that?), load the raid drivers and THEN chkdsk it to repair it. i've also got some sort of hard disk repair software that helps me out...but yea, win xp and raid drivers? bah. im surprised when i reinstalled windows on this damn thing it worked....

anyways, is this a feasable idea? hope it gets better for you soon. and yea, ntfs writing on linux is SO unsafe, i would not dare to try it. (plus, its really complicated last i checked)

[Xzin]

Well see the problem is not that it needs to be chkdsked... I CAN chkdsk it and then get it to mount in linux with write enabled.

The problem is I need to get SOMETHING to write to the drive and do a system restore. All I need is a command prompt to remove the bad drivers and repair the registry.

Which I am trying to get but the stupid F6 driver loading is not working no matter what I do. The drivers are there, it just does not want to load them.

And pressing F6 and having it work sometimes and others not reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPRHoHqvdjY

[deadarcher]

command prompt? new? old? i use a windows 98 cd...or even a win98 boot disk that supports cd drives and what not....so yea, if you need that, i have some files

and the f6 thing, you can get them off a floppy, correct? (thats the only way i know of)

[keyclone]

a thought.. since you are using them for multi-boxing, why not just have a single, smallish(60GB), fast (10,000 rpm 16+M cache)drive for the OS and apps, and be done with it? have your raid be a NAS style drive like this:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0256583

or this:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0256406

and you'll never have to worry about your data again. also, norton's ghost rocks... and it works with linux disks wonderfully (we use to use it for embedded monitoring systems)

funny thing though... today i was also dealing with an issue that had my box offline from 10am to 7pm tonight... at which time i had my first meal of the day. what a pain in the a**

[Xzin]

command prompt? new? old? i use a windows 98 cd...or even a win98 boot disk that supports cd drives and what not....so yea, if you need that, i have some files

and the f6 thing, you can get them off a floppy, correct? (thats the only way i know of)

The drives are NTFS, not FAT.

[Xzin]

a thought.. since you are using them for multi-boxing, why not just have a single, smallish(60GB), fast (10,000 rpm 16+M cache)drive for the OS and apps, and be done with it? have your raid be a NAS style drive like this:

That is basically all I have, except the main drives are striped... which honestly gives me little to no extra performance gain for WoW.... my real file storage happens on a different box, which is raid 6 and blazingly fast.

but this is my main box..... and until I can manage to upgrade it to a fast enough solid state drive - it's good enough.

Just a pain in the arse to administer if / when it goes down.

At least it is XP 32 and not 64..... *shudder*

[Xzin]

Figured out the txtsetup.oem is caused by drivers being in folders and not on the root drive.

It's not like a floppy IS THAT BIG or anything..... recursive directory search XP? Nooo.....

[esoterik]

time to call....

GEEK SQUAD BABY

sorry I had to.

[Mannyman]

I tried using raids a few years ago. I didn't see much of a performance increase, and it was a pain in the ass when I had to boot with F6 because I usually take the floppy drive out of my systems.

[deadarcher]

geek squad, lol. yea xzin, before i went to bed i thought to myself 'oh shit, ntfs not fat' heh. oh well. anyways, whats your progress on it? did it get resolved? do you still need a command prompt with ntfs support? im sure i have one somewhere...heh

dead

[keyclone]

hey xzin, i just got a bootable disc yesterday (free from microcenter... what's a geek squad ;) ) that has a ton of system utilities on it.. including ntfs from dos-like prompt.

i could make an image of it for you if you need it. just let me know.

[Xzin]

Nah, I got it to boot with the proper F6 drivers, but now it thinks I have a 750 gig drive. I don't.

Continuing to make progress, should find a fix by tonight.

Just wastes my time.

lol @ calling geek squad. They would just reformat it and steal my porn.

[deadarcher]

blah...that just sucks :( i hate messing with raid. but after the install mine works just fine, and its a pretty nice performance increase. of course, i never store any useful information on my raid ;) i just use it to run windows.

and lol @ your geek squad remark. but if you still need some software......or anyone needs some software, i can get my hands on a lot of stuff..so just ask.

[Xzin]

Finally fixed it. Had to do a complete registry restore.... and even managed to snag another completely unknown error that involved rebooting several more times. I love it when you press F6 10+ times it never registers. So you reboot and try pressing it once, thinking perhaps the KB "buffer" may have been overloaded. It still doesn't prompt to enter a 3rd party driver.

2 or 3 more reboots later (and it has to load about 10 minutes worth of files with every reboot) it FINALLY gets the memo but then gives some bogus error (most likely due to floppy drives being, oh, 10 years old and prone to failure).

I had such hope for the Jahshaka video editor too - but yeah it completely hosed my system. Guess it is time to find something better.

At least I had the foresight to backup my registry files.... reinstalling EVERYTHING would have been....

A 2 - 3 day job. Even with the data.

Of course in Linux..... it would be a 10 minute job.....