P4C800-E Promise RAID problem

[FACTION95Si]

I have an ASUS P4C800-E. I'm using the Promise RAID ports. I have 2 SATA drives that I have configured as RAID 0 for my OS drive C. I am now trying to add 2 more IDE drives which I have both plugged into 1 IDE cable thats plugged into the single IDE RAID port on the motherboard. I'm trying to have the 2 IDE drives run as a RAID 0 for my data drive D. I can build it in the BIOS utillity but when I go into windows the IDE RAID isn't recognized. What am I doing wrong ?

[kct2]

Is the IDE RAID driver loaded?

[FACTION95Si]

Do I have to load a driver to run the IDE drives? How can I do it from windows XP?

[kct2]

In order to run the IDE RAID in windows you need the RAID driver. It is posted at the Asus site in the Driver tab of the Downloads section for your motherboard. There is a regular ATA driver, and a IDE RAID driver, you need the RAID driver.

Install it like any other driver upgrade (assuming you already have the promise controller installed with the standard ATA driver).

[FACTION95Si]

I installed windows with the 2 SATA drives. When I booted up to install Win XP I had to hit F6 to load the RAID drivers. Now I am running my OS on the 2 SATA drives in RAID 0 config. Now I added another 2 IDE drives and I have them setup in a RAID 0 configuration. Both RAIDs are seen in the BIOS but the second RAID that I built (regular IDE drives) isn't being detected by Win XP. It only sees the first RAID, my C drive. How can I get WinXp to see my second RAID?

[kct2]

You installed the SATA RAID driver during install, not the PROMISE ATA RAID driver.

[zebkoolindc]

Did you fdisk the ide drives

when you install windows it will partiton a drive for itself but all other drives you will have to do it

[kct2]

You don't use fdisk with XP (you can, but there is no reason to). You partition/format in Disk Management. But if the IDE-RAID driver isn't installed, the array won't show up there either.

[shadowdr]

What brand and size are the drives?
You have allready tried the jumpers as master/slave and cable selt/cable select?
If you did use fdisk,did you set the partition as active?
Did the drives come with installation software?
Have you gone into device manager and checked the mass storage controllers.You can update the driver from there.

[FACTION95Si]

I went back and selected SATA + PATA in the bios and then I reinstalled windows. When I selected which drive to install windows on and to set the partitions both arrays showed up. I just wish I could have done it within windows.

[FACTION95Si]

The 2 serial ATA drives are Hitachi 80 gig and the PATA drives are seagate 40 gigers.

[kct2]

Originally posted by FACTION95Si
I just wish I could have done it within windows.

What did you try in Windows?

[FACTION95Si]

I tried to find the second RAID in windows but nothing was detected. I looked in device manager and nothing showed up. This is my first experience with RAIDs so I didn't really know what to do. So I just started over and got everthing to show up once I reinstalled win XP

[kct2]

Originally posted by FACTION95Si
I tried to find the second RAID in windows but nothing was detected. I looked in device manager and nothing showed up. This is my first experience with RAIDs so I didn't really know what to do. So I just started over and got everthing to show up once I reinstalled win XP

Cool. My guess as to what the problem was is you had the Promise ATA driver installed, which would not be able to see a RAID array. In order to see the RAID array you would have needed to install the Promise ATA-RAID driver (as I suggested:-/ ).

Glad you got it working...

[spclwpns]

The array may have to be "started" or initialized.

Admin. tools>Computer management>Disk management. First initialize the drive (array), right click I think, then format.