RAID on KT7a-RAID - I am stumped

[Ridenow]

My turn to ask a question.

I have a KT7a-RAID motherboard that I have been running for several weeks with no major problems. I finally got 4 WD400BB hard drives and attempted to setup a RAID. I can see them in the RAID setup, but not under the OS. They simply do not show up under My Computer. I have an Adaptec 29160 card with a Fujitsu drive that is running W2K Server as my boot disk. I did install the 4 in 1 drivers, except the ATA100 driver, like the manual said for W2K. I installed the High Point driver, twice, once from CD and once from the webpage. I removed the SCSI card, in case there was an odd conflict. I selected the RAID as bootable. I tried 4 drives, 2 drives and only 1 drive. I tried mirroring and I tried stripping. I started with ww BIOS and then tried zt. I booted from a Win 98 floppy and I still could not see the drives. I checked the cables. I am thinking that the High Point controller is bad. Anybody have any ideas or do I get to have fun RMAing the thing?

 

[Ridenow]

Figures. When I have a question, I have a *QUESTION*.

 

[n2]

yea bro... its definitely a question...
i bought this board <kk266-r> intending to set up raid...
<someday anyway>
but i still don't really understand that much about it.
the seniors are mostly dealing with the testing of the new forums...
i KNOW some of them, know raid configs..
perhaps you should search topics for "raid"
then see what seniors have what set-up and who seems to know it..
then drop an email. thats what i'd do, i know you gotta be frustrated by now!
sorry i can't help more.

 

[Eriksson]

I would go thru the bios one more time to check it the ATA100 controller is enabled.

 

[TT120]

I didn't see it in your message and I'm sure you did, but, I gotta ask, did you partition and format those raided drives? When I set up my raid, it blew away the partitions that were on both drives and I had to go into Fdisk and set it up again.

 

[JEFF]

yea,my wd's werent formatted either,the first i had formatted on another computer but when i got the second and tried to set up raid i had to use a:\ bootdisc to formatt.

 

[GOD]

go over here to find out what u r looking for .

Loading...

it will have almost all the info that u need about setting up your KT7A-R .

GOD.....

 

[WillysNut]

Hey RideNow...really basic but...check to see whether your drives are 66 or 100 drives....and make sure your on the correct connectors on the mobo. I believe there are two for ATA 33/66 and two for ATA100.

 

[pmoores]

Cant help you directly since i got my raid disabled for now till i can afford a 2nd 60gig ibm.

But if you havent been here yet, try: http://www.icronticforums.com/

This forum is just for the kt133 motherboards with 10,000's of posts on various related subjects.

 

[aeon]

I know this sounds goofy, but I had a similar problem when i tried to install Win2k from an existing WinME install. My HPT370 would not correctly recognize, and I'd sit at a blank boot screen until I powered down my pc. At a loss, I finally bought a full install version of Win2k, formatted, and installed Win2k from nothing. Amazingly it worked.... My BX133-Raid could actually "Raid," so i was happy as hell. Maybe give that a shot.

 

[Ridenow]

Ok. I was expecting to setup the RAID, go into Windows click an e: icon and have it tell me that "this drive is not formatted, would you like to format(Y/N)?" As soon as I am done reading a few more posts I will format each drive individually. Cross your fingers for me.

 

[Daniel ~]

It may be different, but Promise RAID REQUIRES that both drives be formatted as a single RAID drive. Then the System sees them as a single drive.

 

[Jason]

Okay, here's a crazy suggestion.. I had almost the same problem with my board. Do you have a ZIP drive or LS-120 drive? If so, either disconnect them or disable the primary and secondary IDE controllers. When I had this problem initially, I was truly stumped. I had determined that if I partitioned, formatted, and made bootable the array in a different machine (Using a hacked Promise Ultra66), then transferred onto the KT7A Raid, it would boot from the array. Next step was disabling the primary and secondary IDE controllers and just leaving the highpoint controller active. I was shocked as hell when it worked! A little further investigation told me that removing the LS-120 and ZIP drive allowed me to re-enable the IDE Controllers. I ended up putting the LS-120 and ZIP into one of my servers. Hope this helps out!

Ridenow (Jun 05, 2001 11:33 p.m.):
My turn to ask a question.

I have a KT7a-RAID motherboard that I have been running for several weeks with no major problems. I finally got 4 WD400BB hard drives and attempted to setup a RAID. I can see them in the RAID setup, but not under the OS. They simply do not show up under My Computer. I have an Adaptec 29160 card with a Fujitsu drive that is running W2K Server as my boot disk. I did install the 4 in 1 drivers, except the ATA100 driver, like the manual said for W2K. I installed the High Point driver, twice, once from CD and once from the webpage. I removed the SCSI card, in case there was an odd conflict. I selected the RAID as bootable. I tried 4 drives, 2 drives and only 1 drive. I tried mirroring and I tried stripping. I started with ww BIOS and then tried zt. I booted from a Win 98 floppy and I still could not see the drives. I checked the cables. I am thinking that the High Point controller is bad. Anybody have any ideas or do I get to have fun RMAing the thing?

 

[Ridenow]

It gets worse! I pulled everything out. Only things left are the video card and the floppy drive. I connected one hard drive to IDE 0 header. No jumper for stand alone and a known good cable. Put in a 98 boot disk and set the boot sequence for floppy, then IDE 0. Reboot, the BIOS flashes up "Primary master: WD400BB blah, blah UDMA mode 5". Let the prompt come up, type "c:" press enter. Got the drive not found or invalid drive letter message. I checked all the cables, none were flipped or loose. Tried again, same results. I removed that drive and put in a second one, same result. I shut it off and went to bed! You have to understand, I had a 20 gig drive on that controller yesterday. I will pull out the old system and try to format or even see it with a 40 pin cable.

 

[Jason]

Ridenow (Jun 08, 2001 09:32 a.m.):
It gets worse! I pulled everything out. Only things left are the video card and the floppy drive. I connected one hard drive to IDE 0 header. No jumper for stand alone and a known good cable. Put in a 98 boot disk and set the boot sequence for floppy, then IDE 0. Reboot, the BIOS flashes up "Primary master: WD400BB blah, blah UDMA mode 5". Let the prompt come up, type "c:" press enter. Got the drive not found or invalid drive letter message. I checked all the cables, none were flipped or loose. Tried again, same results. I removed that drive and put in a second one, same result. I shut it off and went to bed! You have to understand, I had a 20 gig drive on that controller yesterday. I will pull out the old system and try to format or even see it with a 40 pin cable.

This may seem like a silly question, but have those drives been previously configured as an array? If so, it's possible the OS wouldn't recognize them as standalone devices. If they haven't, have they been partitioned individually? If you use fdisk, does it report that there are no hard disks present?

 

[Ridenow]

Any comments and questions are appreciated at this point. I am a certified (or is that certifiable?) tech (Dell), but I am forgetful so I am taking even silly questions seriously.

They are brand new drives, factory sealed. Usually they come unformatted or formatted with FAT16 and have some little utility/readme.txt on them. Last night I was using a 98 boot disk. I should have run fdisk to see if it recognized any drives. I should still have been able to type c: and get something.

 

[Jason]

Ridenow (Jun 08, 2001 02:01 p.m.):
Any comments and questions are appreciated at this point. I am a certified (or is that certifiable?) tech (Dell), but I am forgetful so I am taking even silly questions seriously.

They are brand new drives, factory sealed. Usually they come unformatted or formatted with FAT16 and have some little utility/readme.txt on them. Last night I was using a 98 boot disk. I should have run fdisk to see if it recognized any drives. I should still have been able to type c: and get something.

Actually, if the drives are not partitioned, it will not recognize them as existing in any kind of DOS mode. Typing C: would result in "Invalid Drive Spec"

Try fdisk on either the disks or the array

 

[Ridenow]

Doh!!!!

fdisk worked. What I had to do was set up the RAID, boot from a floppy and fdisk the whole RAID as one disk. The weird thing was that it said the partion was around 10000 Mbytes. Then I told it to duplicate the mirrored disk. Reboot from the floppy again and format. It takes a long time to format what will become an 80 gig drive. I put the SCSI drive back in and booted W2K. No problems, RAID is running. Thanks guys.