Soyo dragon plus, RAID and 200 GB HD

JameyF

Senior member
Oct 5, 2001
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I have just purchased a 200 GB Maxtor HD. I installed the latest bios from Soyo's website so it claims I can use larger than 137 capacity drives. I can't get the 200 GB drive to be recognized correctly when using it as a slave to my pair of WD 60 GB drives I am using for the RAID 0. I was using a pair of 40 GB Maxtors as slaves so I know smaller drives will work, but I guess I still have a limit somewhere.

Has anyone used a 200 GB HD with their Soyo Dragon Plus K7V?
 

Boonesmi

Lifer
Feb 19, 2001
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which controller is it attached to? the onboard via southbridge , or the onboard promise controller?
 

JameyF

Senior member
Oct 5, 2001
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I hooked it up to the RAID controller first. No go there so I went to the standard IDE connections. No go there either. Hooked up as a slave to the RAID 0 drives it tries to use the last working config (40 gig maxtors), but it fails. I've deleted the 40 gig info in the config util but it always goes back to the 40 gig settings when I do the auto setup.

Since I posted first, I have now installed the PCI card that came with the drive. The card installs fine, and the drive shows up while booting, but it hangs windows XP every time I try to format it. I'm going to try to format in DOS and/or move the PCI card to a different slot. It acts like an IRQ conflict when it hangs. I think I can get it to work with the PCI card supplied, but I was hoping someone had a 200 gigger working without a seperate add-on card.
 

JameyF

Senior member
Oct 5, 2001
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Both the RAID config and the 200 gig drive hooked up to the supplied controller share the same config address according to windows device manager, but it doesn't list it as having a problem. I would say that is the problem getting it to work with the supplied card. Any ideas on how to get the 200 GB drive to be recognized as drive 1 instead of 0 (the boot drive)?
 

JameyF

Senior member
Oct 5, 2001
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I haven't been able to get it to work. Whenever I hook it up to the supplied card, Windows crashes. I've been able to hook it up to the onboard IDE connectors, but it is seen as a 200 GB drive in the bios, but 32GB drive in Windows. I've gotthe latest updates from windows. It seems the next step is to put all my HD's on the supplied controller card, but I'll loose my Raid controller. This isn't a great solution. Any ideas?
 

Boonesmi

Lifer
Feb 19, 2001
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if bios is recognizing it as a 200gb drive, but windows is only seeing 32mb then i would start suspecting the drive

is the drive partitioned? also have you tried formating it outside of the windows environment?



 

JameyF

Senior member
Oct 5, 2001
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Absolutely, that was what I was thinking, so I redid some things....

I first hooked it up to the controller, but that gives me the conflict. I'm positive it is because the MB has a RAID controller AND a standard IDE controller so I can have up to 8 devices with the MB itself. Since there is already a second "SCSI" seen spare controller onboard it is causing MUCHO problems getting them both to behave together. I go with the fact I'm either going to have to put all my HDs on the supplied controller (NOT acceptable), or assume I can't use the controller at all.

So, with the given that I can't use both controller's I went back and made the 200GB drive a slave to a DVD drive with the onboard IDE controller knowing (hoping) that the 200GB couldn't be labeled a boot device, and even if it could, My bios states look at the RAID controller first for a boot device. As my last post said, it only showed up as 32GB instead of 200GB, but the MB bios AND the maxblast software both still show it correctly as a 200 GB capacity until I get into windows.

I remember reading something about limiting the HD size by way of a jumper so I looked for that in the manual. I thought maybe I could be satisfied using the drive as a 120GB if it limits it there. It turns out, that was the first error I was making. I had actually set the jumper to limit the HD size instead of acting as a slave, and it limits it to the 32GB I was seeing. So yes, there was a problem with the drive, but it was something I did. I blaim this on being hasty, and the manual's pictures being misleading to those being hasty :D. This cleared up that, but it still didn't get windows to look at it correctly.

While looking through the manual about the limiting of HD size by way of a jumper, I see that MAXblast makes a change in the registery of Windows SP1 in order for it to see drives over 137GB. HMMMM...It gets interesting when I go back and make sure that maxblast is installed correctly. I guess I installed Maxblast BEFORE I installed Windows SP1 because it hadn't made that update to the registery. That turned out to be the crucial error I was making. After I installed maxblast again, it realized it hadn't made the registery changes it needed to. It did so, and I restarted only to look at NO conflicts.

Could it be installed correctly I wondered. Is this finally the end of the dilema? Turns out it solved all the problems. AND, to top that, it's working exactly like I hoped. I see it as one partition without any need for an extra controller.

For those who may search for this in the future with a similar problem:

1)Install the Windows SP1 and all other updates FIRST
2)Install the MAXblast or your HD's manufacturer's software next.
3)install the drive making sure the first pins are jumped for master or no pins are jumped for slave for the 200GB maxtor.

My only issue now will be the fact I am using this as a backup storage device. I won't be able to get to some information I might need to before I will use the drive to get the rest of my information. I'll have to figure out a way to save that on a CDR.

Thanks for the help boonesmi.