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i am trying to set up a RAID 0 array on a gigabyte 7dxr+ wih 2 Western Digital 40GB ATA 100 HDD.

one of them is straight out of the box, blank, unformatted. the other one has some stuff on it that i don't care about. on my board IDE 3 and 4 are for the Promise MB133 FastTrak Lite onboard Raid controller.

i set both jumpers to master and put the blank one on IDE 3 and the other on IDE 4.

however, when i boot, it does not find the HDD. i have enabled RAID in BIOS, but i think it might have something to do with my IDE ribbons. although the drives are ATA 100, the manual says to use ATA 133 ribbons. i think i might have 1 ATA 133 ribbon in there, but i am really not sure.

would this cause my system to not find the HDD's , and must i use ATA 133 ribbons to set up the RAID array?

Are you sure you have the RAID controller enabled in BIOS? Sounds like you don't.

I know there's no difference between an ATA 66 and ATA 100 ribbon and I always assumed (but not certain) that the same goes for ATA 133.

I doubt that's you problem since even if there was a difference, drives and cables are always reverse compatible. Even if one drive was ATA66 and the other ATA100 it would still work - although your array would be only as fast as the slower drive.

Be aware that the drives will NOT appear in the detected list of drives during the POST screen. That will only list drives detected on the standard EIDE ports. A lot depends on your specific raid controller, but usually a second screen comes up AFTER the POST display that shows the RAID controller initializing and that should briefly display all drives connected to the Raid controller and prompt you to press key combination to access the BIOS settings for the RAID controller to configure the array. If you can't see both drives listed in the RAID controller's BIOS screen then something is wrong. Try swapping the drives and see if the problem is with one of the IDE channels or the drive.

Since these are WD drives, make sure they're jumpered properly. WD drives have TWO different jumper settings for master (one for master by itself and one for master with a slave). Since both drives are on ribbons by themselves, make sure they're jumpered as single masters or CS (CS works fine with most modern controllers).

Most motherboards have a setting in BIOS to individually enable each IDE port - make sure 3 & 4 are both enabled.

Hope this helps...

I am sure IDE 3 & 4 are enabled. i am kinda questionable about the jumper settings. i think they are both set to master, but i will look at them again. and i will try setting them both to CS and see what that does.

since there is stuff on one of the drives, i am not sure exactly what is gonna happen. i am assuming once the drives are detected i will be able to format. but that is why i set the blank one first, because the other one has a boot sector on it

well, i will see what is gonna happen when i set the jumpers to CS...

It's a Promise chip. before the system can use the drives, you have to build an array in the RAID chip BIOS. after you power up and go through POSt, there should be a scren with the Promise chip looking for drives, after that you'll probably need to Ctrl-F to get to the Fastbuild utility and build the array.

And, to reinforce what FP said, make sure the RAID chip isn't disabled, and chack to make sure the WD drives are jumpered to "Single" and not "Master".

Once they're detected they'll just appear as two drives (the RAID controller will not automatically create a RAID array - you have to initiate that manually using the controller's BIOS menu).

Having some data on one drive won't matter. When you create the array, that data will be destroyed.

well, i set both jumpers to CS and it detected the drives and built the array.

but now, however, i believe i am gonna have to flash the new BIOS because during install of win2k pro, i get the blue screen, stop errors because it does not recognize the RAID controller. i tried getting the drivers and putting them o n floppy w/ a txtsetup.oem file. some of you may be familiar with those screens, where it reads type "s" and insert floppy with OEM drivers. i got the correct driver, but i noticed in the BIOS update that there were issues with the mbFastTrack133 controller that were corrected, so i am gonna have to flash the current version.

i tried doing it from a floppy, but it seems like hard luck doing it with no OS, and win2k(no more win98 around here...) can not make a DOS bootable, so what i am gonna do is get out this other HDD i have with win2k and hook it to IDE1, boot to it and flash the BIOS. then i believe my drivers will work on the "press s" screen.

Not sure I follow you.

You're doing new install of Win2K on the array, right?

The very first thing the Win2K installer should do is ask you to hit F6 to install any SCSI or other controller drivers.

You need to have the driver for the Raid card on a floppy - it MUST be unzipped and all files must be in the root of the floppy (the installer will not see the driver if the files are in a subdirectory).

In my experience with Promise controllers, you MUST have the matching driver version to go with the BIOS version (if BIOS version is 1.09 for instance, the driver must be version 1.09 - unlike other hardware you can't use the latest driver with an older BIOS).

Oh, and you mentioned you don't have a DOS boot disk. BEG BORROW OR STEAL a Win98 boot install disk. Those things are PRICELESS. For instance, you'll need one to use Norton Ghost to backup your Win2K partition (if you use Norton Ghost).

Hope this helps...

Actually Win2k can make WIn98 bootdisks in essence. http://www.bootdisk.com for all your boot disk lovin!!

As far as your problem goes, the files can be in a folder as long as the txtsetup.oem is setup correctly (I have a promise FastTrak TX 2000, UATA133, and the driver disk included uses folders). make sure you press F6 when Win2k startup begins and select the driver.

yes, it is a clean install of win2k on the raid array. i went to the promise site and got those files, and put the textsetup.oem file and that FASTTRACK file on it in the root of the floppy, then i put those other files in the sub-folder.

but when i got to where i was to press f6 and "s" to insert the floppy, i did see the correct list of drivers, but still the stop errors.

which is what made me do what i have done now, hook up a HDD from another computer running win2k in the IDE1 channel and boot it up. so now i am in the process of installing all the necessary drivers, including the raid driver, which i now believe has been correctly installed, because after a series of re-starts, i now get to "check drive F: for errors"(scandisk, or whatever they call it now), which is the raid array. i am getting a buttload of "lost chain cross-linked at cluster xxxxxx orphan truncated", and a lot of bad links and stuff. going through all the clusters it looks like. it has been running for almost an hour. i believe this is all those windows setup files and since i added this other HDD as the C: drive, it's trying to reflect the changes and re-link or something. i don't know exactly, but i am gonna just let it do its thing for a while. i got a couple hours to kill

(oops, i unplugged and re-booted and skipped disk-check, and win2k is slow as molasses, ad seems like there are a lot of background problems, so i will have to do the disk check again, from scratch, it seems. well i am not gonna mess with it anymore until it gets done.)

but when i get this thing booted again, i am expecting to see an 80GB F: drive that either has a bunch of garbage on it, or if i boot to it, can still run windows setup. My HDD on the new C: is a Seagate 20 GB 5400 RPM ata100. would it be better to keep this in there mainly for win2k system files and stuff, and use the raid array for apps and storage, or should i continue to set up win2k on the raid array and just make a partition for windows system files, then use the rest for storage and apps?

oh, and also, i still have not flashed the new bios, because the program does not recognize the chipset yet, (until i boot up again) and probably i have to make sure there is not a jumper for "bios write protect" on the board that i have to move.

What are the STOP errors that you are getting exactly?

it was something like "unrecognized boot device" or similar to that. basically it had to do with windows setup not recognizing the raid controller when i tried to install win2k on the array.

well, all the broken links on the array have supposedly been fixed now. what i have now when i boot to the c: (IDE1) is i get an F:, G: and H: drives. F &G are actually the first HDD in the array, on F: drive i see some windows setup files. the G: and H: are completely blank. they are all FAT32, well they were. i just converted the C: to NTFS.

i figure if i boot to the array, then during windows setup, i can choose the option to use NTFS. i am gonna have that floppy handy with the raid drivers just in case, and hopefully this time it will work. i just flashed the new bios, which supposedly will correct the problems with the promise chip.

we'll see how this goes...

i think i got it. i believe it was the bios. once i flashed the new bios, i tried to continue windows setup by disabling the IDE1 channel and booting to raid, but the previous installation files were corrupted by the 2 or so hours of disk checking (scandisk or whatever) trying to fix broken links once i added that additional HDD to the IDE1 channel. but before i saw the screen where it told me the install files were corrupted, i did press f6 to install the raid driver, and this time, it worked! i attribute it to the bios update.-

however, i just ran the windows setup from scratch and it hung. looks like i have some problems with my array. i boot up again and it tells me my array is off-line. i delete the array and re-build, and try again. still off-line. i will check the connections and try again later; however, i think first, i will use the WD OEM disk and format these suckers...

oh, you mean "STOP: 0x0000007b INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". means the driver for the RAID chip either isn't loading or is incorrect.

are you getting the drivers from gigabyte's site? I took a look at the driver file (20276.zip) ,and I think I fugured out what you need to do to install on RAID 0.

- get the 20276.zip file from gigabyte, and unzip it.
- navigate to the /20276/ideraid/driver/ folder. in it are a bunch of files (including txtsetup.oem) and 4 folders: NT4, Win2000, Win9x-ME, and WinXP. copy all of the files to the root of a blank floppy, and copy the Win2000 folder over.
- boot your system, and create a stripe (RAID 0) array using fastbuild.
-boot from your Win2000 CD, and press F6 when prompted.
- put the driver floppy you created in step 2 in the drive, and when it asks for the driver floppy hit enter and select the Win2000 driver.
- you should be able to format it as a single 80GB drive and install windows on it.

In reply to Jimz comment, I have two 40gig maxtors and I couldn't partition them because the array was too large (I'm assuming) It only saw 10gig, so what I did was download a newer fdisk version (http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/) and it worked great.

You don't need fdisk with Win2k, you can partition and format from within 2k.

FDISK has a problem with drives over 64GB (i think that's the size). MS released an updated version but I never got it to work properly with my 120GB array nor the 160GB array I had. I just used Win2k setup's fdisk-like utility.