[Dave65t]

My sons Dell XPS 600 running Vista Home Premium won't boot up properly!
It just hangs when starting windows.
Have tried last good restore point - same symptons Tried safe mode - where it loads about 20 files then hangs.
The 2 hard disks are striped
Any help would be appreciated
Thanks
Dave

[Advertisements]

Do you have your vista disk?
If so then please try start up repair.Link below explains.
http://windows.micro...asked-questions

[rockmilk]

Do you have your vista disk?
If so then please try start up repair.Link below explains.
http://windows.micro...asked-questions

[Dave65t]

Thanks for the reply
I have tried the repair option on the disk but when you get to the point where you select an operating system to repair none are listed to select.
All that is available is a 'Load Drivers' button.
Reading other posts I think I may have to load the raid drivers so that windows can see the striped hard disks.
Does that sound correct?

Thanks
Dave

[khushifairy]

My friend had the same problem. she simply removed Win Vista and reinstalled Win XP, though she installed Vista look and feel software with it.
in this way she used Vista appearence and evrything but the booting and drivers problem was solved because of XP.

Edited by rshaffer61, 08 December 2011 - 10:08 PM.
Removed advertisement links

[rockmilk]

I am not sure what a striped hard disk is I am not going to pretend that I do I will ask another member here to look into this.

[rshaffer61]

Striped hard drive is a Raid setup Rockmilk.

[rockmilk]

EDIT: Also khushifairy seems to be a bit of a spammer!

Removed advertising.

I will get Happyrock or Troy to help as I'm no good at Raid either.

Edited by rockmilk, 08 December 2011 - 10:12 PM.

[Troy]

Reading other posts I think I may have to load the raid drivers so that windows can see the striped hard disks.
Does that sound correct?

Thanks
Dave

Hello,

Yes if the drives are set up in RAID array you will need to load the RAID drivers before the disc can see the available drives. Also it is possible that you only have a single drive running in RAID mode (i.e. RAID mode set in the BIOS) and therefore would still need to load the drivers.

You can grab the drivers off the Dell support website. You will need the Dell service tag to help you find it. If you have trouble you could PM me the service tag and I'll find them for you.

Troy

[Dave65t]

Hi Troy

Thanks to you and the others that have taken the time to reply!

RAID mode is set in the BIOS which sees the twp 500GB disks as 1TB. When the machine starts this bit still appears to be working.

I've found the RAID drivers here:

http://www.dell.com/...riverId=R147467

Can I just confirm what you saying - that even though the RAID is set in the hardware the Windows Vista Repair disk still needs to load the Nvidia RAID software drivers in order for it to be able to see the Vista Operating System?

Thanks
Dave

[rshaffer61]

I can backup Troy's suggestion from another Staff member Kemasa who suggested the following also.

My suggestion would be to have him run diags on both of the drives to ensure that there is not a problem with one of the disks. RAID0 is really AID0 and so one disk can ruin you day.

The problem is that you need to have the RAID drivers loaded to do certain things, which can be an issue with getting the system "repaired".

[Troy]

Can I just confirm what you saying - that even though the RAID is set in the hardware the Windows Vista Repair disk still needs to load the Nvidia RAID software drivers in order for it to be able to see the Vista Operating System?

Exactly!

Then once the startup disc can see the installation, you can then proceed to run diagnostics as to why it is not booting up.

Keep us informed on your progress.

Cheers

[Dave65t]

Hi Troy

No joy I'm afraid - I select the .inf drivers file and the list of driber files to be loaded appear.
It then spends about 10 minutes with a 'loading drivers' popup and then then comes up with an error popup saying 'failed to load drivers'

Incidently the whole system seems to take ages when going through the various steps before you get to the point where you attempt to load the drivers i.e you put the cd in and it must take about 10 minutes before you get the language choice screen - then after that another 5 minutes before it comes up saying that no O/S installation can be found. Even then ehrn you pick @load Drivers' it takes another 5 minutes before you can see the 4 drives (c:, x:(32GB) and the two DVD drives) which you might select from.
You can't hear any hard disk activity noise during these periods of delay - I was wondering if there were read errors across the RAID and the delay was being caused by read retrys.

Just to be sure I've tried running a tool to scan the two individual hard disks (it doesn't see them in a striped RAID configuration - and they came up without errors. Of course I don't suppose this is conclusive!

Looks like I'm heading for an o/s reload - unless you can suggest anything else? Its a shame I would like to get the O/S up even in a temporary way just to get some user files off.

Thanks
Dave