AW Notebook - D900K HD Issues

Howdy,

I'm trying to help a buddy out that is having problems with his Alienware notebook. The model on the back shows it as a Clevo D9K.

Apparently somehow his HD got corrupt. He has two 120GB SATA Seagates operating with RAID 0. At bootup it still shows the RAID Array, at 240 GB but just won't boot up due to system configuration errors. Basically I am trying to do a fresh install of XP on the notebook.

I am having troubles installing the RAID/SCSI drivers for the hard drives. At bootup , during RAID check, it shows it as VIA Tech. VT8237 SATA RAID. He didn't have the original MOBO cd, so I created a XP cd with the raid drivers (downloaded drivers) using nLite.

I was under the impression that the streamlined cd should automatically use (or at least know they are there) those drivers. The XP Setup still doesn't detect any hard drives. Any ideas where to go from here? The laptop doesn't include an internal floppy, so I can't install the drivers that way. Also tried putting a cd with the drivers in another drive on the notebook to see if the setup would recognize it but it still does not. Perhaps I have the wrong drivers?

Any ideas? I appreciate any help and input in this matter. Thanks for your time!


-- Jordan

Hello again,

Well I found someones post that Clevo has posted drivers for the D900K so I went to http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/e-services/Download.asp and downloaded the VIA Raid drivers for XP there. Using nLite I have burnt some slipstreamed xp iso's to try but still getting no success. I keep getting an error when the text setup initializes "viamrx64.sys" is corrupted. I figured this was a problem with the mobo not being a x64 processor, so I removed the x64 drivers from my disc. Just installed the i386 drivers into the cd and tried again.

This time I am getting the same error and yet that viamrx64.sys file isn't even on the disc. Any ideas?

I am stumped on this notebook. Any suggestions? Besides a swift kick.

Thanks!

-- Jordan