ATA/Raid Problems

[ZachMarius]

I just recently bought an Promise Ultra 133 TX2 ATA/RAID card from Newegg. I folled the directions to the point to install it and after it "detecs" what drives I have plugged into it it goes to a blank black screen with a cursor indicator (like in the matrix (dun dun dun)). Anyway I've configured my BIOS to read Boot from the drive through my main hdd (which is the one Window is loaded on) and it still comes out like that. Can anyone help me? I've got a Compaq S3400Z with Windows XP Home. Two Hdd One Seagate 7200RPM 120GB (boot disk) and One Western Digital 5400RPM 100GB (second drive). 1536MB RAM. I have the Seagate and the Western connected to my RAID card. My DVD drive to my IDE system board controller 1 CD-RW to my SBC* to IDE controller 2 and the floppy disk to SBC* 3. My computer is already configured for windows and all that but I want to use the Raid card to speed up user time between hdd's

Thanks

 

[Ryoga]

You generally can't move a Win2k/XP install from one HDD controller to another and still have it work. The boot loader will be looking in the wrong place to find the OS. You'd have to install the OS to the drive while it's connected to the PCI card.

Also remember that the boot order should be configured to be "SCSI" to boot from a PCI card. The listings for "IDE-0", "IDE-1", etc point to the on-board controllers.

Finally, unless your motherboard is very old, you will not see any performance gains by running the HDD off of a PCI RAID card. The interface speeds on your motherboard are already higher than the average transfer rate of any 5400RPM or 7200RPM HDD.