windows won't see raid

okay, situation...

ordered an adaptec 1200A raid card and 4 western digital 250 gb hd's

installed the card, installed drivers( weird thing is the win2k drivers required a file from winxp folder, but w/e, installed and worked fine)

windows see's the card, I installed the software to set up the raid. The card see's the hard drives, I set up 2 mirroring raids(raid 1), one confined to channel 1, one confined to channel 2.

problem is, this entire time, windows dosn't read the hard drives. windows see's the card, the card see's the hard drives, heck it made the raid, but I can't access to raid for storage purposes. The point of the raid is so that a local township can store maps of the town safely for use by the entire township. but if I can't access them as a drive D lets say, than I can't share across the network..

am I miss understanding something? did I do something wrong?

plz help

do you see the arrays inside disk management? (right click computer, "manage", click disk management) maybe all you need to do is format them.

could be it, I'll hafta wait till monday until I can find out

Ya... You probably just need to format it... I use Partition magic but the windows Formatting bit will do just fine.

MLMIB said:

okay, situation...

ordered an adaptec 1200A raid card and 4 western digital 250 gb hd's

installed the card, installed drivers( weird thing is the win2k drivers required a file from winxp folder, but w/e, installed and worked fine)

windows see's the card, I installed the software to set up the raid. The card see's the hard drives, I set up 2 mirroring raids(raid 1), one confined to channel 1, one confined to channel 2.

problem is, this entire time, windows dosn't read the hard drives. windows see's the card, the card see's the hard drives, heck it made the raid, but I can't access to raid for storage purposes. The point of the raid is so that a local township can store maps of the town safely for use by the entire township. but if I can't access them as a drive D lets say, than I can't share across the network..

am I miss understanding something? did I do something wrong?

plz help

Click to expand...

So far I understood it to make windows see the raid you have to install the raid driver at the beginning of the windows install (press f6 for aditional drivers). Have fun with a fresh install!

Re: Re: windows won't see raid

NiTCOM said:

So far I understood it to make windows see the raid you have to install the raid driver at the beginning of the windows install (press f6 for aditional drivers). Have fun with a fresh install!

Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that...

I think it's only when you are installing Windows itself onto that RAID array that you have to load the drivers for the RAID controller before the actual installation begins.

Otherwise you can do it after Windows installs.

Example:

On my Abit IT7, I installed the Highpoint 374 RAID controller drivers after installing Windows (which was on a single hard drive connected to IDE 1 and not connected to the RAID controller), and I had no problems seeing anything connected to that controller afterwards.

Re: Re: Re: windows won't see raid

shiyan said:

I'm not so sure about that...

I think it's only when you are installing Windows itself onto that RAID array that you have to load the drivers for the RAID controller before the actual installation begins.

Otherwise you can do it after Windows installs.

Example:

On my Abit IT7, I installed the Highpoint 374 RAID controller drivers after installing Windows (which was on a single hard drive connected to IDE 1 and not connected to the RAID controller), and I had no problems seeing anything connected to that controller afterwards.

Click to expand...

yes, you do not need to do the whole f6 thing if you didnt' install windows on the raid array. as a matter of fact, there is no way to install windows on a raid array and be able to boot into windows and not have it show up

it just sounds like you need to format the array or install the drivers for the adapter card. if the array doesn't show up in disk management, check the device manager for any devices with exclamation marks.