How do I turn my RAID controller's into IDE?

GremlinHater

Senior member
Jun 6, 2001
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Iwill KK266-R

I'd like to use the raid controller to put some extra drives on, HOWEVER, I don't want them in any kind of RAID whatsoever, how do I do it?
 

stso

Platinum Member
Nov 17, 2000
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I'd like to know too.
RAID is kinda useless to me .... (backup data only, right? I'll back up on CDR)
 

Bozo Galora

Diamond Member
Oct 28, 1999
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Abit has stated on their website on describing some of their earlier boards (like the SA6R i815) which allows "up to 8 ATA100 EIDE devices" - Hipoint 370 chip.
Gigabyte, like the GA7DXR (AMD 360), can have up to four ATA100 devices and four regular IDE devices on the raid connectors, but you cant boot from the two raid connectors unless setup as so.
The Aopen 37AX+ (apollo pro266) with the promise 20265R "lite" ATA100 raid chip will not allow ANY IDE non raided device to be recognized on those two connectors. I have spent hours trying every possible jumper/bios setting to no avail. Finally I just bought a $26 Promise ATA100TX2 PCI card for the other (up to 4) IDE/ATA100UDMA devices.
You must look extremely carefully at the IDE specs and how they are worded to see what you can do. (i.e. - "in addition to raid, this board has 2 dual channel ATA100 compatible ports for up to 4 devices")
 

junthin

Diamond Member
Jul 21, 2000
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The best way (IMHO) to enable your RAID controllers into regular IDE Channels is: (I'm assuming that's what you want, right? And I'm also assuming you are doing this one a computer with an OS and programs installed, and you are not going to reformat. If you are going to reformat, the process is different....) Btw, what OS are you running?

1. Turn the computer off, and move the jumper on the motherboard to "enable RAID" (see manual) DON'T change any positions on your cables since you will need your boot drive on IDE 0 Channel.

2. Turn on computer (when you turn on the computer during the boot up sequence you will see the "Hyperdisk RAID" boot screen for a few seconds and it automatically goes into the Windows boot screen afterwards, remember this) and goto the Device Manager and your "RAID Controller" should be in the unknown devices section of the device manager (signified by a yellow question mark icon)

3. Double click on the "RAID Controller" device, and then goto "Update Drivers..." and then use "specify location" for the driver. Either load the driver from the 3.5 Disk included with the RAID Drivers or the Iwill CD that comes with the motherboard (Should be in the raid something directory)

4. After you install your RAID Controller, reboot and make sure the RAID controller was installed correctly (check your Device Manager), then reboot again. When it's booting up at the beginning hit "Del" and set your CMOS to have the boot order of:

1. Floppy
2. Hard Drive 0 (your hard drive with the OS)
3. RAID100

(This should enable your RAID ports to be used as regular IDE channels)

5. Now, here is the tricky part...since this all depends on the configuration of IDE devices you have. Note that the RAID IDE ports can only be connected to Hard Drives. Assuming you want to put more hard drives in, I would keep the boot drive (Drive with your OS) on the IDE0 (the regular IDE channel) and put your extra IDE Drives on the RAID controller IDE channels.

The reason for keeping your boot drive on the regular channel instead of the RAID channels is because some systems get blue screen errors frequently when you move the boot drive on to the RAID channel. However, your mileage may vary (YMMV). (I've had 3 systems give me blue screens installing the extra RAID channels and moving the boot drive on to the RAID channels after everything is setup, but then again, I had another 6 systems that performed fine when I did the same thing. <shrug>

6. When you boot up, watch your screen. Make sure at the beginning (when you can hit "Del" for the setup of CMOS) you see the correct IDE devices booting up (on regular IDE channels). Then afterwards on the "Hyperdisk RAID" screen during the boot up, make sure the right IDE devices are detected (these are the ones on the RAID channels. Note your Hard drives will not be using the IDE channels as "RAID" since you did not configure it by hitting Crtl-M.

7. In windows, goto My Computer and make sure all your drives are present and detected by the OS. ;)

Enjoy your extra IDE channels! :D

If you have any questions let me know via Private Messages. I'll need to know more machine specifics to help you out. ;)
 

Bozo Galora

Diamond Member
Oct 28, 1999
7,271
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sad: that was a fantastic link!!!

Brought out solutions that never occured to me:
all devices on RAID bus should be set masters: MAKES SENSE!
Dont load VIA IDE Bus Masters for on board IDE opticals - not needed if boot drive on RAID

thanx again, i'm off to play with several sys