Help! PCI Raid card can not detect HDs! Urgent!

[wutou]

Hi, I am a newbie here. I'm building a system from scratch. P4 1.6A, MB: P4S533. I'm trying to use 2 WD1200JB HDs and a tekram ultra ATA 100 raid card to do raid 0. There is only a CD-ROM in onboard IDE primary master. When I start the system, there is a vocal message "no IDE hard disk detected", after that, the system detects the tekram raid card, but it can not find any disks attached to it. I'm sure all the cables and jumpers are correct. Do you know what is possibly going wrong? Do I have fdisk and format the hard disks using onboard IDE before I can move them to the raid card? Help! I'm really desparated now.

 

[Peter]

The system BIOS sees only those drives that are connected to the legacy IDE channels (read: those on the core chipset). Those on the RAID card will have to be managed by the card's own BIOS. You should see the latter's sign-on message, and you should see it detect and identify the connected drives. This is on IDE controller level, partitioning and initializing file systems (fdisk, format in DOS-speak) comes _after_ that. If your drives aren't detected on controller level, then there's something wrong in hardware. Check cables (used them the right way round, blue connector toward PCI card?), jumpers, drive power ...

regards, Peter