no boot after enabling BIOS RAID0

[ryanmhale]

I just bought a refurb Dell XPS 420 w/ Q9300, running Vista Home Premium x64 and downloaded/installed an activated version of Win 7 Ult x64 on an 80GB SSD [Sata1] I bought for it; dual booted w/ Vista x64 on old hard drive [Sata0].

W7 x64 was running stable and instantly fast, I wanted to enable RAID0 on the old hard drive [Sata0] and another new hard drive [Sata2]

I entered Intel Maxtrix Storage Manager (Ctrl-I), creating a RAID0 volume on [Sata0] and [Sata2].

After reboot, it says "No boot device available" after BOIS screen.

My subsequent boot attempts include (roughly in order):
1. disable RAID0 volume, boot to [Sata1]
2. disable [Sata0] and [Sata2], boot to [Sata1]
3. disable [Sata1], boot to CD/DVD-drive (W7 install/boot)
4. disable CD/DVD-drive, boot to USB flash (W7 install/boot)

I have done some digging around and cannot seem to find a solution. I have the use of my notebook (w/ broken DVD burner, still reads) running Win7 Ult x86 so apparently I cannot make my USB flash drive x64 bootable from what I've read. I also have 2-USB hard drives (80/250GB) and an eSata 2x docking station available, but no eSata on notebook.

Hope I gave enough info for someone to come up with an easy fix. If I could boot to the W7 x64 install DVD that I made with the non-booting PC, I would have just done a clean install by now, but it refuses to boot to the CD/DVD drive. It actually wouldn't even boot to DVD to install W7 x64 in the first place, I had to install from Vista. Also I do not have a Vista x64 install disk either.

Thanks in advance to anybody would can help.

 

[Antman]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2432-usb-windows-7-installation-key-drive-create-2.html

You should be able to create a bootable USB for a 64-bit install using a 32-bit OS. Some users report challenges, but I suspect PEBKAC.

I believe that you stepped on your boot files on SATA0.

 

[ryanmhale]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2432-usb-windows-7-installation-key-drive-create-2.html

You should be able to create a bootable USB for a 64-bit install using a 32-bit OS. Some users report challenges, but I suspect PEBKAC.

I believe that you stepped on your boot files on SATA0.

PEBKAC indeed; I got a bit anxious about setting up RAID0. Until that point everything was going great, but I didn't think about addressing boot file issues I may encounter.