Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

RAID & HD Issue -- system won't set HD properly unless RAID enabled

Status
Not open for further replies.

rjk10

Technical User
Dec 9, 2008
1
Hi, I am facing a very odd issue with RAID in a WinXP system that has a single HD. I accidently loaded & saved the default settings in the BIOS. The system now fails to boot past the initial diagnostic screen -- it appears due to the HD -- unless the "SATA RAID Enable" option is enabled in the BIOS.

- If I disable the RAID option and boot the following happens: the startup diagnostic screen shows the system picks up the HD, skipping into the BIOS I see that it sets it as "IDE Channel 2 Master" and is identifying it properly (model, size, etc.). But instead of than progressing to load WinXP, I get a blank screen and continous beeping.
- If I set "SATA RAID Enable" to "enabled" and than boot: I get the startup diagnostic screen (it shows nothing regarding the HD), than a "VIA RAID Setup utility" starts and scans for a RAID setup, it says something along the lines of "no RAID found", it picks up my sole HD and sets it as "Channel 0 Master". On this configuration everything works fine (no blank screen/beeping, WinXP loads & identifies the HD correctly as well).

This wouldn't be a big problem except that I can't run chkdsk, windows setup, recovery console, or any other pre-WinXP type program under this setup (with the RAID enabled and setting the HD). They can't seem to pickup the HD with this configuration even though WinXP works & picks up the HD fine. There is only one RAID related option in the BIOS and that is "SATA RAID Enable" which can be set to enabled or disabled. The system auto detects the HD and I can't manually change it to Channel 0/1/2 Slave/Master myself. There have been no hardware changes to the system or changes to the HD between when the system picked it up fine without RAID and now when it doesn't (i.e. no jumper settings changed, no other hardware added/removed). The only thing I can put a finger on is that I loaded up & saved the default settings and it appears this issue started thereafter. I would appreciate any insight anyone has on this issue. Thank you.
 
Sounds like the bootup options are set to load the VIA RAID controller rather than the onboard. Do you actually have the drive plugged into the IDE 2 channel?
Take out the VIA RAID card...assuming it's PCI...

Burt
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top