Asus P4S8X IDE questions

[Lothar1974]

I have been working on a PC for my friend, he had one hard drive setup as a raid config. He wants to add another hard drive and have both setup on IDE instead of raid. The cdrom drives were originally on the primary ide channel, I switched them to the secondary channel with one as master and one as slave and the hard drives on the primary one as master one as slave. I can see both hard drives OK but not the cdrom drives. In the bios I have it setup to auto detect but still nothing. Do I have to to turn off the SiS 180 chipset on the IDE side? I am not to familiar with raid. Other than this possible solution I cannot get the secondary IDE to see anything.

 

[Zepper]

How did he have one HD setup as RAID??? Any RAID I know of requires at least two drives. A normal controller won't see RAID striped or arrayed drives. And if it was setup as RAID-0 then you only have half the data there - the other half is on the other drive. You'll have to hook it back up to the original RAID controller, move the data to a normal HD or other backup device, then wipe the drive and FDISK and Format the drive on the new machine.
.bh.

 

[Lothar1974]

He had a local shop intall all his pc parts, they had only one hd set up on raid (Pc only had one hard drive), it would boot saying no ide hard drives installed then go showing the hard drive on the raid setup, top of the screen said Raid 1 + 0 stripe 1 showing the drive. It is a 40 gig and showed as 40 gigs. Everything was working fine on it.

 

[Zepper]

That was pretty stupid as most RAID controllers on mobos can also operate as standard controllers - no need to mess with the RAID if you don't want to (and no one with only one drive should want to!). So you will have to do as I said in my first message. Hook it back the way it was, etc.. There is some software that can get info off RAIDed drives (one is called R-Studio from r-tt.com), but that will cost you some money. Cheapest (except perhaps for time) the way I suggested.
.bh.

 

[boomerang]

So the BIOS won't see the CD drives or Windows won't or both?

Regardless, if you're using an 80 wire IDE cable, make sure you have the black connector on the Master and the gray connector on the slave. Try just one drive at a time. Sounds as if you have a cable problem or one or both drives are not happy jumpered as they are.

Try a new cable if need be. Make sure they have not disabled the Secondary IDE in the BIOS.

This is a bad cable or configuration problem.

If using an 80 wire cable, you may need to jumper these drives as Cable Select.

 

[Lothar1974]

I had a frend who works at a repair shop take a look at the system. He tested everything and said the secondary IDE channel is bad. Guess my buddy's going to RMA the board. Thanks everyone!

 

[boomerang]

Sounds like it was bad from day one, doesn't it?

The original shop sounds real reputable. Glad it's still under warranty.

 

[Lothar1974]

He bought his board right after I got mine. I bought mine at Ajump.com, not sure where he got his. I have been looking at replacement boards for him. Looking at the Asus P4S800-E Deluxe.