COMPUTER SPECS: Pentium 4 (1.6) 512 RAM Hard Drive 1: On Motherboard IDE 1 set as Master (Quantam Fireball 30 gig, Windows XP) Hard Drive 2: On Motherboard IDE 1 set as Slave (Maxtor 40 gig) CDRW: On Motherboard IDE 2 set as Master CDR: On Motherboard IDE 2 set as Slave Hard Drive 3: On RAID PCI card’s IDE 1 set as Master (Maxtor 80 gig) Hard Drive 4: On RAID PCI card’s IDE 2 set as Master (Maxtor 80 gig) Hello, I have a RAID ATA/100 PCI card. I set my two 80 gig Maxtor hard drives as masters on its IDE 1 and 2. Both drives have been initialized as Basic Disks via XP Pro’s Computer Management. Both drives are formatted as Primary drives in NTFS format. Both of their jumpers are set to ‘Master.’ Upon computer startup, the RAID card Bios recognizes them as being Masters on RAID IDE 1 and IDE 2. I do not want to install XP Pro or any system on these two hard drives. I only want to use them for striping to avoid dropping frames during video capture. Should they be ‘basic’ or ‘dynamic?’ The problem is that when the two drives are set to ‘stripe array,’ Windows XP will not load from hard drive number one (30 gig Motherboard IDE 1 Master). After the RAID Bios loads and recognizes the two 80 gig drives and gives the option of pressing ALT-M to go to the RAID setup utility, the screen goes blank. It is as if the RAID card is trying to find a system on one of the hard drives connected to the RAID card. Of course, neither of them have a system as I only want them for Striping and storage. Since there is no system, maybe this is why the system is hanging. I have tried entering the RAID setup (ALT-M) upon restart. It shows the Stripe Array as set to ‘bootable’: Description: Array #0 (online) Array type: Stripe 156334 megs (these are the two drives combined) Drives: 1 and 2 Stripe Size: 64k Bootable: Yes When I highlight ‘bootable’ and try to turn it off, I am not allowed to. The only way I can get XP to load is to change the Array type to ‘spare pool.’ Finally--when I load windows and try to use the MegaRaid IDE Console, it freezes. What am I doing wrong? Thanks, Gene

Thats way too many drives for that computer. You need to have two PSU's to handle that load. I'm not one for IDE RAIDS. LVD SCSI or even Fiber Channel - Both are expensive. They make SATA, which is supposed to be the cheaper alternate to scsi, but why can't they just lower the price of scsi? I think it should be cheaper for having to put up with hard drives that sound like turbines. some tips: check to make sure the ide card is firmely set in the mobo. Set the drives to cable select or null (newer hdd's where no master or slave is defined). Try the dynamic set up. Check the Bios and make sure its not trying to load off the Raid or even seek it. Load windows, try the Raid manager.

Don't confuse what XP does with a drive (Basic or Dynamic) with what the RAID controller does with a drive. The two are not the same though the results are similar. Dynamic is how you would setup your drives for SOFTWARE Raiding via XP. Since you want to use your RAID card for HARDWARE Raid, leave the HDDS as BASIC. As you have formated the drive under XP, I will assume you have loaded the driver for the Raid card and it works okay. Your boot problem may be caused by how the boot selection is set in the mobo BIOS. Your's sounds like it is set SCSI C instead of C SCSI. Check it out. In order to get rid of the BOOTABLE on the RAID drives, you will probably have to delete the ARRAY#0 and start over from scratch. As to the blank screen - good luck. My ST-Labs Silicon Image RAID 133 card used to show the RAID configuration when I first installed it. Now it doesn't - I get a blank screen on startup until the Verifying DMI Pool screen comes up. Changing BIOS options (and clearing the BIOS) hasn't helped. Striping the machine down to 1 DIMM and video card hasn't helped either (no sound, NIC or RAID card). Only by replacing my 17" SVGA monitor with an old 14" VGA am I able to see the inital POST boot screen (the one at the begining that shows the memory test running) and then the RAID config screens. I was also seeing that the 1st drive wasn't always showing up in the RAID config screen upon a soft reboot - but would be there in XP (or W2k) once the OS loaded. A reset resolved that issue.

gt500shlby's post came up while I was writing my first response. To answer the "TOO MANY DRIVES" - I run 5 HDDS (in various IDE RAIDs), a CD and Burner and could use a 3rd 80GB 7200rpm drive for what I want to do. There is never "TOO MANY" but the point about the power supply could be right on - depending on what Gene's PS is (he didn't say). I put in an Antec True480 PS to keep things running (22A on the 12V). My old generic US-Can 300W (10A on the 12V) wasn't quite keeping up with things even when I only had the 3 5400 rpm HDDS.

no, I didn't mean too many drives to have. The more space I have for crap the better. I meant power wise. I have an Achieve 500W PSU and I draw about 48% - 61% load on it with 2 HDD's, 5 case fans, Tt volcano11+ cpu fan, Tt Hardcano, ATI 9700pro AIW, etc.. I like having a cushion, kind of making everything better than it has to be. If I were to have 6 IDE HDD's and a Raid card to power I would be drawing at least 85%, thats not much of a cushion. I still would rather have scsi, but its just too damn expensive. The harddrive costs more than my computer did.

If your problem is not yet solved, also not that if you want to have better fault protection for your raid array, keep only one hard drive per ribbon, thus if one hard drive fails, it often (not always) crashes the IDE bus it's on if it does not crash the computer itself (if you are runing raid 0 or 1 which are each linera arrays on only the 2 drives on your raid card, you must set that array in the card's bios utility, providing it has one. windows will only recognize what the hardware tells it, so if you create the array on your card with the 2 drives, as one array, windwos should detect it as one hard drive (unless you do not set a raid array, in which case it will act as a normal IDE bus. there is nothing wrong with IDE raid, although SCSI is prferable, IDE is a better solution for lower budgets, with few drawbacks. www.linuxdocs.org has a great detailed explanation of all of the raid levels and theory associated with RAID. (it's titled linux-HOWTOs-SoftwareRAID), even though you are doing hardware raid, this is still worth the time to read the beggining part and explanation. The hanging screen may be your "boot loader" which is the first loading bar you see before the color xp bar. The boot loader stores essential support for the operating system, like hard drive support. if you installed XP before setting up your raid devices, it may be trying to boot from a non-existent device, or conflicting with the raid array drive. make sure your bios is set to boot to the hard drive which has windows first (c) and you probobly dont even need to put in SCSI boot support, seeing as how you are not booting from it. try booting from the xp cd, with everything plugged in it's current configuration and doing a repair. If it is unable to find the c drive, you know it is most likely BIOS or hardware. Fool with bios settings, (chang eonly one thing at a time), and if that doesnt work, you may have to rebuild your array and reinstall from scratch. If it finds the c drive and the windows install, then you are most likely having a low-level software problem. do a reapir from the XP cd if you are able, and if it still does not work, re-install xp on top of the copy you currently have. If you find that the problem is hardware, try messing with riad and motherboard bios settings. please email me to let me know if it worksd, and what solution you used so that I can use it if I ever encounter such a problem myself. Good Luck.

hello, i have the same problem as the one in the first post.. ive just bought 2x200gb westerndigital, and a Sandberg ata133 raidcontrollercard.. and have striped it raid 0,1 and when i boot the system (when striped) i get a "blackscreen" and the system will not boot. then if i unstripe it again i can boot normally.. ive tried change many different things in bios.. but nothing seems to work :( i can't even boot from CD when ive striped.. i have to unstripe it to use any way else than boot from floppy.. it's really weird.. please respond to this post. :) thnx.