Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal, WD 80gb IDE, WD 45gb IDE, Lite On CD- Burner... This is the basics of the system... I have the CD-Rom on IDE 1 and the HD's on IDE 2 or 3 tried both, jumpers are correct... boot from Windows XP CD installer doesnt see HD's they show up in boot but not in Bios... I think it is something With raid drivers but i havent gotten any to take... when i put the HD's on IDE 1 and CD-Roms on 2 nothing is seen in boot or bios...


Please Help...
Thanx
Nick

Have you reviewed all the setup details for RAID?

http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard...5X%20Royal.htm

There will be a setup step at the beginning of XP asking to press F6 in order to install RAID drivers but if the BIOS isn't detecting the drives it would appear that other installation steps are neccessary.

Have you read all the RAID documents here:

http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard...5X%20Royal.htm

THank you for the help i couldnt find those RAID manuals the first time i looked... i'll try that... also when using RAID do the HD's have to be the same size??

Same size: in general: no. Unless you are mirroring drives.

Same speed: yes! Or very preferable. Different speeds will go to the lowest & might cause other conflicts.

http://www.finitesystems.com/PRODUCT/raid/raidlevel.htm

http://www.google.com/search?q=when%...0same%20size??

Originally Posted by jephree

Same size: in general: no.

Are you sure about that Jephree? I had heard that, if you are using hardware RAID, as in this case, that the drives have to be the same size, even for RAID 0 striping.

In any case Nick, does it work if the RAID option is disabled? Does it work if you only have the hard drive connected and not the CD drives? It might just be a simple case of jumper conflicts between the different drives.

Sorry, just realised the stupidity of that question - you can't boot from the CD if it's not connected. Try it with one hard disk (the one that you want to install the operating system on) on IDE1 and one CD drive on IDE3 or IDE4 so that they are on different channels and won't conflict.

Remove the complications - get your operating system installed and make sure it boots OK a few times. Then install your other drives after that.

Originally Posted by DJNafey

Are you sure about that Jephree? I had heard that, if you are using hardware RAID, as in this case, that the drives have to be the same size, even for RAID 0 striping.

I am sure about nothing DJ

I was relying on other postings

But then I didn't read far enough:

>> Technically, they don't have to be the same size either.

If they aren't the same size, the bigger drive will only use as much as the little drive can hold. i.e. a 80 GB and a 40 GB drive in RAID0 would result in 40 GB on each. You can combine both of those volumes into 120 GB using JBOD but generally you see a slight decline in performance with that.

___
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
--Albert Einstein

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