Windows not seeing SATA RAID disks

[mortimer]

I added two SATA drives today. Decided to run them as a stripe. It has been down hill since then. System is in signature.

Questions:
1) Any idea why it now takes about 5 minutes to boot?
2) Any idea why Windows does not see the RAID array even though HD Tach does, sort of?
3) The Promise web site has never heard of the 20376 controller although several board manufacturers used it. Any ideas on where to find out more about it?

What I've done:
- Add the drives, reboot. No floppy.
- Connect the floppy power connector, reboot.
- Press ctrl-f during boot to set up the array, reboot.
- Boot into Windows. Very slow (5 minutes to boot). I saw this behavior several months ago when I used a bad IDE cable.
- Check Device Manager. Using DMA, which is good. The damaged cable caused PIO to be used.
- Check "My Computer". No device for the RAID array.
- Run HD Tach. It sees both "C:" (IDE) and "" (RAID). This is weird as running the short test gives 113MB/s on the RAID.
- Do some Googling, pretty slim pickings unless you are using Linux.
- Post a quick question in the Storage forum. Some looks but no replies.
- Download the latest Promise driver from the MSI web site. When will I learn? I've been burned by the offerings on the MSI site before. VIA as well, but that was another nightmare. This led to a situation where a reboot happens after applying "your settings" or some such.
- Boot off of the WIN2K CD to try to repair. Disk error. There is a crack on the CD. Obtaining a replacement as I write. This is a licensed copy of Windows so I'm OK with getting a replacement disk.
- Boot into Safe Mode to uninstall the RAID controller, unplug data and power cables to the SATA drives. Works although booting still seems slow.

Seems like I was here this morning. Veja Du I guess.

[klingens]

Read this excerpt from the Promise website, especially the last line:
Promise does not offer support on any of the following:

• Controllers sold under another vendors' name
• Systems such as those from Dell, Gateway, Micron, NEC, Fujitsu or others that may include a
Promise controller
• Motherboards which have an embedded Promise controller

Also if you search the promise site for "PDC20376", you will get some results. No driver of course, mainly press releases and such.

I dunno about Win2k, but XP has a tool under "Administrative Tools" named "Computer management console". There is a submenu storage there where you can assign arbitrary driveletters to partitions and disks. It seems like the RAID works fine, it just hasn't a drive letter assigned to it.

[mortimer]

Thank you! I'll give it a try.

[mortimer]

It turned out ot be two problems.

Need to format drives to get disk letter. Good catch!

Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management

Windows should view the array as a single disk.

The second problem was performance. I ran HD Tach and got 3.9 MB/s. I've seen this before. Improper IDE connection. Could be bad cable, cable not seated properly, or bent pin. Will check the hardware and then uninstall/reinstall the IDE controllers using Device Manager.