RAID and IDE configurations

[DarkFudge2000]

I own the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard. I have 1 SATA HD connected as the main drive, I just went out a bought a 2nd Hard Drive. A Maxtor 300Gig Ultra ATA/133 Hardrive......I plugged this drive into the RAID Ultra ATA 133 connector because I want to take advantage of ATA 133 and the IDE channels on the MB are only ATA100, but when I boot up Windows it wont see the second drive.

Did I do something wrong?...On boot up, the BIOS seems to see the 300gig Maxtor drive on its Raid Ultra ATA controller but when Windows launches, it only shows the 1 drive.

Maybe I didnt configure something in the BIOS right, I switched from RAID to IDE....is that why?....Can I have just one single drive hooked up to this controller?...or must there be 2?


I dont really want to set up a RAID....firstly because I dont know what it does, and secondly, dont you need 2 indentical drives to set up a Raid?

Can someone point me in the right direction?




I have my primary drive plugged into the SATA interface on the motherboard ( this works fine )
I have 2 DVD Burners plugged into my IDE interfaces ( they both work fine )

I am now simply trying to install a 2nd hard drive, Maxtor 300gig Ultra ATA/133, as a backup drive but I dont want to plug it into one of the IDE channels because the manual says they only support 100ata. So I am simply trying to use the onboard Promise Raid controller that supports Ultra ATA/133 to setup my secondary HD but I am not really interested in a RAID setup. Is this possible or am I not able to use this Promise Controller for basic Hard Drive support?...Im not very well versed on RAID stuff

thanks for your help

 

[kylef]

I'm assuming that you've installed the Promise RAID driver, correct? (http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us)

And you're searching for the new disk partition using the Disk Management utility, correct? ("diskmgmt.msc")

I had an old MSI motherboard that had an onboard Promise IDE RAID controller, and in order to hook a single drive to this controller, I was forced to define a 1-drive raid array. It seems silly, but the Promise controller only worked if you defined an array. Everything worked once I set that up.

So when the Promise BIOS flashes on the screen, it will probably say something like "No RAID array defined" or something... hit the keys it suggests for defining a new array. Then walk through the RAID array instructions and define a new 1-drive stripe (Raid0) array.

Then next time you boot windows, assuming you have the Promise RAID drivers installed you should see the newly available partition in Disk Management, and you'll be free to initialize the disk, partition it, and format it.