CRAZY raid floppy driver problem

I am trying to get a promise raid card (tx4310 and ex4350) working and having the craziest problem. I should have called them during the week but I kept thinking it must be something hardware related. I have been doing IT for 20+ years so it could be something impossible to figure out or something off the wall or something else.

I have a new build with an ASUS crosshair MB and 4 sata drives to raid5. I have a promise raid card and the drives initialize and everything. During xp setup I put in the floppy and choose the correct card from a list-everything looks fine. Then when its time for windows to copy the floppy files to the new HDDs it gives this error: "The disk or cd you inserted may be damaged. "

So I tried a different floppy disk, then I tried a different XP disk, then I tried a new floppy drive, different raid bios, different driver version, different model raid card, creating the disk from a different computer, and then I finally realized that I get the exact same error putting a blank floppy in the drive.

So I checked out the txtsetup.oem and as far as I can tell it's correct. One floppy was created from a CD program, another from a download, and the latest from a straight folder copy from the newer card's CD.

Can't figure a way around the floppy driver. I think that it must be a confilct between the crosshair MB and the floppy...I am stumped. Well I just thought that someone might have an idea so I don't have to wait until monday morning I alread messed around for a week thinking that it must be one of the above problems with the disk etcetera.

thanks

 

Some things I would check.

That the BIOS is set to boot to a "SCSI" or other adapter card before a "HDD ". I am setting up a SATA/RAID card on an ASUS A8N-SLI and needed to set the boot order to Removable before HDD.
It looks like all the drives are connected to the RAID card, correct? If you have any other drives connected (IDE or onboard SATA), disconnect them if they don't need to be involved in the Windows installation.

Disconnect and reconnect the floppy drive cable at the motherboard and even try another cable if it is not a new one. If the pins on the floppy drive do not have guide around the connector, it is easy to offset the connection by a pair of pins.

Check any settings in the BIOS for the floppy drive. It probably won't have the very old settings, but it could be set as a 2.88Mb drive, not a 1.44.

If the support people could not help, I would look at removing and rebuilding the array.

Matt

 

Stick a Win98 boot floppy in the A drive and if it boots up, your drive and its ability to read a disk is fine. If no go - something is obviously mucked up that needs correcting.

My suspicion is that you have not made a good driver disk. Most of those Promise cards had two sets of driver options. One was for a RAID setup and the other was termed something like Family of Drives (their terminology for JBOD). These were very different and mutually exclusive Whatever machine you are using to make a floppy, check to ensure that it is reading hidden and system files. You also want to make sure your driver files are matched to the card's BIOS - one can't mix and match. Promise has or had a pretty good tutorial on this whole subject - have you found this and read it. You should be able to get the correct drivers and all that good stuff from the Promise website. I'd also delete the current array and rebuild it.