Help needed please on SATA Raid
I have bought 2 Seagate SATA drives and connected them successfully to my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. They ran sweetly for a few weeks as standard drives.That was the easy part. Then I decided to use them as intended in the RAID configuration. I entered raid and set the drives in the Stripped Raid mode. Thats where the problem started !!!! Now, my system can see the drives on power up when the Raid message appears, but they will not fire up and I get the following error messages:

NVIDIA Boot Agent
then
Initialising MBA press alt delete and B to configure
then
Preboot execution
then
Media Test failure. Check cable (All cables are fine)
then
Disk Boot Failure

I have gone back into the raid setup and deleted the raid but still the drives do not want to play ! I have now put a spare drive in this puter and tried the sata drive connected - the system does not see it ! How can I get my drives back please ?????
I dont care if I have to wipe and start over (I cant do that at the moment)

Thanks

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UPDATE

I have just finished talking to Tech Support at Seagate and they inform me that there are major issues with this Asus mb and the Raid controller. This applies to all manufacturers of hard drive, not only Seagate. I started by telling him what drives I had and then the motherboard, and the immediate response was "I do hope you did not try running Raid on that motherboard" so it seems it is a known problem - just not by me alas !!
He directed me to the Asus website. The annoying part is that I have only recently bought this board but it has been around for some time now - why was there not an addendum inserted in the manual to tell us of this. I now have 2 120Gb drives that are inoperable at the moment.

Have you flashed the BIOS to the latest http://www.asus.it/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=A7N8X%20Deluxe

Perhaps using Seagates diagnostic software http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html will help bring your HDs back to life if a BIOS upgrade fails.

I would confirm this with Asus. I know you were directed to the Asus website, but did the website menton anything about your board experiencing this problem and would a bios flash fix the problem.

14:30 - Nothing on ASUS website about a potential problem (thanks Seagate !!). Phoned ASUS UK Technical support. They have not heard of any problem with this board with Raid setup !! They are saying that now I will have to start with two blank drives to set up the stripping raid. Also that I should set the bios to boot first from SCSI device. They get a lot of enquiries from people setting it up incorrectly. I do now, however, have one drive back. I just started WinXP auto boot from cd and it has given me a fresh install - but obviously minus the progs I did have on it :uhwell:
Methinks I will leave RAID alone for a while, until I can find a step by step guide to doing it properly.

From my experience with these 2 giants in the industry today, I would hope it would not be too much to expect one of them, or both, to provide a guide to setting RAID correctly!

Thanks for the input.

i just wouldnt trust another manufactor blaming someone else for it. Actually in the Asus users guide it should tell you how to set it up.

One of the things that BIOS 1.04 fixed was "Fix large data transfer failed under Win2K and WinXP with hard disks configured as RAID0", according to the "more discription" for this BIOS download.

The destructions for setting up RAID starts at page 91 of the user manual and can be downloaded here. ftp://www.asus.it/pub/ASUS/mb/socka/nforce2/a7n8x-deluxe/e1292_a7n8x_deluxe.zip

Lot of information here (http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/) regarding this mobo - someone should be able to help.