Hey guys, I ran into an issue I don't really have much experience with on my OLD P4 3.4 Ghz Dell XPS system from Dec 2004:
The system came with 2 74GB WD 10k Raptors in RAID0 (which is still a pretty decent perf setup from what I understand). 1 is in SATA0 and the other is in SATA2. A couple years ago I installed a 250GB WD HD in the case, and plugged it into SATA1 (think that's correct) and things worked fine and the system booted fine, etc. So now I just got a 1TB WD HD and swapped out the 250GB one in the case with the 1TB. I had formatted the 1TB in the Thermaltake BlacX while attached to my laptop and it seemed fine, though I think one key issue is that I marked it as "Active" after the format. Concerned about that, I googled and most posts said it shouldn't be an issue in most systems. Well, as it turns out, it is an issue for me (not sure why tho). When the system boots with the 1TB drive connected (I disconnected it to get the system to boot) it gives me the "NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart" error! Freaked me out for a minute and then I googled (http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm ) and saw it had to do with boot order and missing MBR and realized it probably had something to do with that new HD being marked Active (since the 250GB one never was and it was installed in the exact same place). So my question: is there any way to fix this other than taking the 1TB drive out and reformatting it and NOT marking it as Active? If so, would changing what SATA port it's in (i.e. putting the other 74GB WD into SATA1, so it's seen before the 1TB one) make any difference? Is it as simple as changing the boot order on the PC b/c for whatever reason it's checking the drives in the wrong order? Does the RAID affect this in any way, or not really? Just wanted to get some ideas about what to do as I'm a little concerned with mucking around making changes to see what works since I've never really touched my RAID setup since I got the PC over 4 yrs ago and didn't want to mess it up and lose all my data since it's RAID0.and also to understand exactly how it was working in this case (or not working actually) for my edification. Thanks for any help guys! BINO
