Raid or not to Raid?

[seigfried]

Building a new AMD Athlon 3200+ 64bit computer

Gigabyte GA-K8NPRO MB
I have two hard drives, a new Maxtor and an older WD800JB ... both EIDE.

My old system died for reasons I still don't understand and I have built a new one to replace it. The Maxtor is the connected as the master and the old WD is connected as a slave. The old WD drive information isn't recognized by the BIOS, but that's another problem. (If you would like to comment on it as well, however, I'd appreciate it!)

My question is that I don't know what "Raid" and "Base" really mean in the BIOS setup.

The BIOS default is Raid. The only other setting is "Base". Now ... I know what raid is and I don't think I want it. I just want a single master and a slave so I can work on recovering it. But I'm not sure what "Base" means here.

 

[Odeen]

I have had a K8N Pro. Good board, ASIDE from that Gigaraid PATA chip.

Unfortunately, it's a piece of salame. CPU utilization is sky high, performance is abysmal, and it really puts my faith in Gigabyte as a premier board manufacturer into question.

If you INSIST on using it, set it to BASE, and the chip will act like a regular (not RAID) controller. Then download the drivers off Gigabyte's site, make the driver floppy, start the Windows install and hit F6 immediately when prompted. Insert the floppy so Windows XP can add the Gigaraid drivers to its driver hive and you can install XP directly on a drive attached to the Gigaraid-controlled PATA port.

Try to avoid having a master and a slave on the same channel. It's largely a deprecated feature and you'll be playing jumper musical chairs. If you only have four drives, run your opticals off the mobo controllers and hard drives off the Gigaraid chip. Splurge another three bucks for another hard drive cable (PM me if you need one, I have spare rounded and regular ribbon hard drive cables)