Gigabyte Ga-81hxp problem. promise raid chip?

Heya all,
Long time no see. I haven't posted here in a while, but it still looks like lotsa activity is happening here! That's good to hear.

As you might have guessed I didn't just come here to chat. You see I have this problem. I am pretty sure it is the mobo too.

This is what happened my computer worked fine. Then I packed it and sent it out to my college dorm room in boston. Then when I set it up it didn't work.


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**Before you read know this: I am using the onboard promise raid chip 20376 to have raid 0 on two deskstar 60gb 7200rpm**

Problem: When I boot the bios and everything shows up. I see that it detects my 3.5, my dvdr, my dvdrom, and all. BUTTTT! Then it tries to boot up from the harddrives and it says "No bootable devices."

Because it booted up and I was able to see the bios and all I know that the ram works, the video card works, the processor worx.

I took out the harddrives to test them and my friend put them in his computer. They both were detected and seemed to work fine.

I think that the motherboard promise raid chip 20376 is broken/not activated... (pretty sure its not psu b/c it is a quality one)

What do you guys think?!!!! I am out with no computer! argg.

As of now I will recheck the manual for a on/off of the raid chip (that I don't already know about. Because i know about the setting in the bios where you choose: raid/ata/disabled).

Then if I can't fix it, I will get gigabyte rebate for new mobo (hopefully it has a longer than 1 year rebate).

Then I will buy a new mobo of the same kind... because I don't want to spend time redoing all the tweaks I've done (even tho itll be faster).

C yaz and thx everyone in advance. You guys always have the best knowledge and advice.

When you set up the array did you set the HDD's to be bootable devices in the ITE raid bios?

yaaa, sooo anyway. So far what has happened is this:

I took the hdds off the raid chip. Wiped them. Put them on one of the regular ide cables. The dvd drives on the other cable.

I installed winxp. It works... but VERY slowly. Anything that accesses the hdds makes it REALLLY slow.

I took the newly formatted hdds and tried them in my friends computer and transferred a 700mb file to each to test the speed. AND it turns out that it works fine on his computer when I transfer something like that....

So I know the proccessor works, I know the ram works, and I know the hdds work. The only problem then is the motherboard... so I am going to get an rma from gigabyte.


I won't actually be using the rma gigabyte board for myself. I'm going to get a new motherboard, specifically the "MSI neo2-fs2r". Good board according to tomshardware. So I will be set. We'll see what happens!