HELP!!! KT7A-Raid

Hello,

Some may remember my questions about switching from a kt7-raid to a kt7a-raid mobo.
Now, i have some problems.
Let me explain what i did.
I formatted the drives, installed the new mobo, and hooked my cd drives and hd's back into it

It should work if i have my two raided drives as the master on the two separate raid connections on the motherboard correct? Or am i wrong?

The system boots, detects my dvd, then goes through the checking for the raid 0 array.
It finds the drives for it
Primary Master: drive for raid array 0
Primary Slave: None
Secondary Master drive for raid array 0
Secondary Slave: none.

It then freezes, and stops loading. It doesn't try to access my floppy drive, to boot further. The boot order is floppy, ata 100raid, cd-rom.
No matter how insignificant you may think a detail i may have missed please ask if i did something.
Heat should not be an issues as in the bios it reads 27C
Do the drives have to be on the same cable into the mobo?
Im looking for any suggestions.

thanks in advance.
Steve

The things I would try.....

Hook the drives upto the regular IDE controllers. Boot with a floppy. Delete all partitions on both drives.

Move the drives to the RAID. Enter the HPT control program and then make the raid drive.
Then mark the drive array as bootable.

Boot from a floppy. FDISK the new disk into the new partitions you want. Make sure you have one of the partitions marked as active. Reboot from the floppy, then format.

For some reason, once they are hooked up to the RAID controller, you can't delete individual partitions made on a regular controller (at least I couldn't, don't anyone flame me). I had to hook them back to the regular controller to delete the partitions.

Ok little update...
umm it correctly detects the cd roms
and detects the raid array but it stalls after detecting the raid array... boot up sequence is floppy, ata100raid, cd-rom

I tried toms idea of taking the two hd's and putting them onto the primary ide cable, when booting the mobo only seems to detect the primary master ide device, and nothing else (neither the primary slave drive on the same cable)
(and neither the cd-rom on the secondary ide master cable)
at which point it stops booting
only if i go into the bios and hit auto detect does it find the respective drives.
Which seems odd to me...
more ideas please
i need em, my friend and i are tapped for ideas

thanks

Had the same problem on kt7ar and 6ar mobo's (same controller). Cleared Cmos, reflashed bios, reseated everything, danced around in circles.....
after all that, and deleting the partitions on both raid drives, they both worked with 1 per channel and with one as master and slave on 1 channel (performance was MUCH better on seperates) No cd's, etc. on ide3 or 4 and they seem to work ok on both boards. Except for a little bsod whenever I rip a cd. Hope to figure that one out later!!!

did u get her fixed?

Sounds like kinda of what I had, cept mine froze on when it tried to verify the DMI pool. I can't help you much, but I ended up just using the Win98 boot disk. Then ran the FDISK etc utilities on the RAID array.
Did you check out the FAQ?

heh forgot all about this post
sorry guys

I took the board back to the store, had them try and get it to boot, it worked PERFECTLY the first time. Before we went to the store, my friend was talking with a guy on irc who had the EXACT same setup as i did. (when trying to config)
asus geforce 2 mx. 2 30 gig ibm 7200 rpm hard drives creative 52X cd rom.
he said that he had the EXACT same problem as i did, it would lock up after detecting drives. he got his board changed, and it worked fine the first time. He got an older rev of board cannot remember rev (it was an smaller production #) instead of a metal arm for the socket it was plastic (only thing i can remember)
So, I asked the store to exchange the board.
They are are all "oh but we just got it to work" attitude, anyway they changed it, for an older production board. I get it home and it boots perfectly the first time. Now, this leads me to beleive that this is a very specific problem that occurs with some abit kt7a-raid boards...i am not sure but it sounds very odd to me...
just my two cents.

I hope not!

I had a few problems with my board, before it fried my 1GHz T-bird

1) sometimes Wouldnt go past verifying DMI pool
2) sometimes on boot, it detected the drives, but gave message "press any key to reboot"
3) on installing windows98 it stalled on "preparing windows setup wizard"

After a LOT of messing around, and finding I could only boot cd's on normal IDE controller as master, I got win98 installed (dont ask me how, cus I dunno)
The install was done in around 10 minutes.. damn fast (IBM Deskstar 40Gb ata100 drive, copied files to hdd and installed from there)
After installation, I shut down, added network card, pressed the power button, and nothing.. nothing ever since
The only gripe I have with the KT7a series of boards is that they dont have the temperature alarm in the bios, like the BP6 has (back using it now)
If it had been there, I'd say my T-bird would still be alive today

RIP T-bird

pete

if it aint broke, fix it until it is