Cannot boot from motherboard IDE with PCI RAID card?

[djeddiej]

Hi -

I posted earlier in this discussion board, and this is somewhat a continuation fo this thread (see

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=986361&page=2

"Motherboard appears to recieve power, but not much else")

Since that posting, I have been able to get into Win XP Pro and do a data backup, so now I am continuing hardware configuration.

In Brief, here are the main specs I am trying to get working

-Asus P4S800 mobo with onboard IDE Raid 133; Award BIOS
-Silicon Image Sil 0680 2 channel ATA133 RAID adapter

What I wanted to do was setup 4 hard drives on the mobo IDE RAID (RAID not active yet) and then just add a DVD-RW on the silicon RAID.

I went to the Award BIOS settings and set it up to load the primary hard drive on the onboard IDE second (assume floppy first).

However, when I go through POST, I cannot go into Windows it basically says disk not found, press any key to continue...it appears to be looking for the primary hard drive on the Silicon RAID controller.

When I remove the RAID controller, I can boot to Windows normally, but of course, I have no DVD ROM to use (since it was hooked up to the RAID controller). I have access to all four hard drives at this point.

So all I want to do is have the silicon image PCI Raid and the motherboard IDE RAID to get along...and load from the motherboard IDE RAID first. Am I missing something?

As a further test, I actually hooked up my primary drive at one point to the silicon RAID, and I actually got it to boot to Win XP (and in addition, hooked up the DVD-RW onto the motherboard)...this worked fine, however - it took a long (long) time to boot into windows, and the drives appear to run slower when hooked up to the PCI RAID. Is this normal? And is this a good thing for Windows in the long run (being able to boot into Windows from either the motherboard IDE or the Silicon RAID)...

Your advice is appreciated.

thanks


Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada

 

[ajeetlal]

When I open my computer, I get a message "New Hardware Found". This hardware is 'Raid Controller'. I dont know what this is! Should I let the hardware wizard instal it or not?

 

[djeddiej]

a RAID controller is simply hardware that can be used to configure how your hard drives operate. Essentially, if you have pairs of hard drives that are similar make and size, you can set them up to have a pair act as one larger hard drive, or have a pair work as redundant drives, so that if one drive fails the other one takes over, or a combination of the two concepts. This is a very simplistic definition, and a lookup on google for "what is a RAID controller" will give you more detailed results.

Check your motherboard manual to see if it has an onboard RAID controller. If it does, you can install it.


Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada