IWILL KA266-R: Fdisk doesn't recognize drives with RAID--HELP

[Democritus10]

I'm having trouble with the MegaRAID setup on the KA266-R. The RAID BIOS detects my 2 drives properly and shows that it has set them up with RAID 0, 64k stripe. However, I cannot get fdisk to recognize the drives ('no fixed disk'). And the Quantum disk manager software for my drives finds them as being only 1k (as opposed to 30GB each, 60GB total) with 'SERIOUS GEOMETRY PROBLEMS.' When I take the drives off RAID and move them to the regular IDE channels, the drives are detected properly, both by Fdisk and Quantum disk manage. If I move them back and recreate the RAID, the same problem arises.

Someone has suggested disabling the IDE channels, but I haven't had the opportunity to do that yet (I'm at work).
Assuming that this works, what will happen when I enable the IDE channels so that I can use the CD-ROM to install Windows 2000? Will fdisk not be able to detect the drives again?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Sandeep
carbon16@hotmail.com

 

[zzzz]

give free-fdisk a chance.

 

[Democritus10]

Thanks, but the free fdisk did not work (it recognized a 0MB drive). But I got everything to work by setting my Zip drive to 'NONE' in the BIOS. Strange little quirk with the board.

 

[Cerebus451]

Just a silly question - do you have drivers for the RAID controller loaded? If you are using the basic startup disk that Win98 creates then it likely does not have drivers for the onboard RAID controller loaded. You would have to modify the startup disk to load them.

 

[Democritus10]

The issue is not with the RAID controllers. There is, installed in the motherboard, a RAID BIOS, which acts in a similar to things like EZ BIOS, etc. When there is a RAID BIOS, no drivers are required in order to partition and format the drives. I've used several other boards with built in RAID (Abit KT7A-RAID, etc) and no drivers are ever required for fdisk and similar applications to recognize the array correctly.

 

[nippyjun]

I have a little ka266/r faq that I've made when putting my system together. If you would like i can email you a copy. Just email me and i'll shoot it back to you..

 

[TJ22]

Plug your HD's into the regular IDE channels then set up your OS. then plug the HD's back into the raid channels. Thats how I did it.