A7V333 RAID problem

[Shagger]

I've got 2 Maxtor 133 40g's on the onboard Promise RAID controllers (1 on each channel) but during boot up I let them auto-configure, thinking that they'd degault to RAID 0 Striping. They haven't!

They're both shown individually in the RAID setup screen as RAID 1+0 and the OS sees them as C: & D:

I want to run them in RAID 0 as one drive.

I've tried deleting them in the RAID BIOS but it's not having any of it. The supplied version of the RAID controller BIOS is "Lite" (Lite weight, I'd say). When I attempt auto-setup it tells me no hard drives are attached.

Please help.:(

[EMC2]

Silly question - you do have the jumper on the motherboard set for using the Promise connected drives in a Raid configuration and not as regular IDE drives, right?

Oh - and to setup the Raid array, you have to build the array through the Raid BIOS. Once it is built, you have to break the array before you can re-build it in a different configuration. Note- all data will be lost in the case of Raid 0.

[Shagger]

Thanks for the reply, EMC2.

No such thing as a silly question, so I double checked and yep, I have the RAID jumper set to enabled.

When you say "break the array" how is that achieved? I've tried deleting the array in the BIOS but it won't have it.

[EMC2]

Sorry, missed the fact you tried deleting the array - that's the same as "breaking" the array :)

If it won't let you delete the array, then you most likely don't have them combined into a single array (further suggested by them both showing up in windows as seperate drives).

Go into the "View Array" menu in the Raid BIOS screen and see what it says. If you actually have an array built, it should show next to "Array 1" under "Total Drives" a value of 2, with no entries for Arrays 2 thru 4.

If it shows instead 2 arrays with 1 drive each, then an array of the two drives was never created.

Go back into the "Auto Setup" screen and select "Optimize for performance" if you want Raid 0 - it should then show "stripe" as the array type below. Go into "Application Type" and set it for "Desktop". It should show below the mode is "Stripe", have 0 for spare drives, 2 for drives in array. Then (this is important) press "Control-Y" to save the changes. It should then go through a time consuming process of actually building the array (it puts down needed data structures) and come up with a "Reboot" message. When it reboots, as it passes through the Raid BIOS it should display on screen the status of your new Raid array a mode of "2+0 Stripe", indicating 2 drives in Raid 0, data striping mode :)

Then you have to actually go in and do windows formatting and partition of the drives before loading any software on the drives.

Important note also - when initially building a Raid 0 array ALL DATA IS LOST on the drives (if there is any).

[Shagger]

Don't know why but after reading your reply and trying the sequence out again IT WORKED!!!!!!!!! :D

I'd tried all this before but the RAID's BIOS wasn't having any of it:confused:

All's well that ends well. RAID 0's up 'n' running.

Thanks EMC2, I'm giving the credit to you.

[PatchleAD]

just a quick thing to check.... i have a a7v133 with a probims raid.... on the mother board there is 2 jumpers... and on the MB the text said to set it to 2-3 2-3 but in the manual i needed to set it to 1-2 2-3, the other option worked( activated the raid bios and stuf) but would not let me creat a functional raid.... worked fine when i changed to jumpers to the same as the manual i downloaded form the web site... (damn typeing errors!)