urgent RAID HELP needed

[jordan]

I need help with this raid board, I have the iwill ka266r MOBO. I have 3 ROM drives, 3 Harddrives and 1 Floppy.

I want to do a stripng raid 0 on 2 of those harddrives and keep the third as a large internal storage disk for mp3 and other stuff.

The board has ide slots labeled 0-4. The raid manual shows nothing whatsoever on the actual hookup of the ata cables.

Does each harddrive get its own ide slot? Can roms be slaved to each harddrive? As best I can figure out, I wont be able to hook up one of my Ide devices, any help would be appreciated- Thanks!

PS- Please try to be specific in regards to what cable should be hooked up to what and where, I am completely lost with this raid ata cable hookup prob.

 

[Tachyon]

I've never configured an IWill board but generally speaking you should put each of the RAID drives on their own IDE channel (3 & 4 for IWill?). I'd make the 3rd hard drive a master with a ROM as slave on another channel and a master and slave ROM on the 4th channel.

 

[Eriksson]

You can try to put ROMs as slaves on the ATA 100 controller.. It works in some cases, but you cannot boot from them should you need to install OS from CD. Some ppl has done this with good results. I have tried this with mixed results. If this doesnt work you can follow Terry's advice. It should work fine.

 

[rocknindy]

in general, ROM drives and raid arrays do not get along too well. HD's only on raid, everything else on non-raid ide's.

 

[Babster]

Okay.

Set both hard drives that you are going to use in the raid array as master with the jumpers.

Put an 80-pin cable from each hard drive to each of the YELLOW raid ports.

All of your remaining hard drives and CDROM/ZIP drives need to be attached to the BLUE primary and secondary IDE ports.

Go into bios, use CTRL M to enter the hyperdisk (Or MegaRaid now with the 4-16-01 bios). Set up a raid 0 array with a 32k strip.

Go into bios and DISABLE primary and secondary IDE, or DOS will not see the Raid Array.

Have a Win98 boot disk with fdisk and format on it. Boot to dos, and you should see a hard drive equal to the size of the two combined drives (mine sees a 58mb HDD for my two IBM 75gxp 30gig hard drives).

Fdisk the array into the partitions you want - patience is required here as it error checks every step of the way, and it will be a time consuming process.

Set the primary partition as active.

Reboot, and format the partitions with the following command: format c: z:32. This sets the block size most compatible with the 32k stripe.


Windows will NOT be able to install while you have the primary and secondary IDE channels enabled! To get your windows setup directory on the hard drive, you must go back into the bios and reenable the primary and secondary IDE channels. Reboot. Now you should be able to Xcopy your WIN98 directory to the C: drive (so you can install win98 from the \win98 directory).

Go back into bios. DISABLE the primary/secondary channels again. Boot to the C: prompt with your boot floppy. go to the \win98 directory and run setup.exe.

After windows is installed, then you can go back into bios and reenable the primary and secondary IDE channels so you have your data drive and cdroms.

It's a pain in the *** and it drove me crazy until I figured it out. For even more details (written MUCH more clearly than this post), go to the KK266 raid faq here:

http://www.fullon3d.com/kk266faq/kk266faq.shtml#RAID

(both the KK266 and the KA266 share the same AMI raid chip, so the setup is the same) ;-)