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Secondary Hard Drive Hijinks

post #1 of 14
11/18/04 at 3:21am
Thread Starter 
I purchased my 8790 with one 60 gb 7200rpm drive. It was setup in the raid mode. I flipped the jumper the jumpers to ata mode and all went well.

I purchased an identical secondary drive and can not get WinXP to recognize it. It appears in the BIOS, however. It also shows up using Partition Magic in the bootup mode (but not in the windows mode). I verified the motherboard switches were correct (off). Also, I reset the system configuration data in Bios just in case - to no avail.

Interestingly, I kept a drive image of a complete reinstall of the OS and drivers that I used to trouble shoot a hardware (DVD) problem. This reinstall was performed with the disk swithces in the ATA mode. When I swap this drive image onto the primary drive, Windows does recognize the 2nd drive.

Does this mean you can't go back to ATA mode even if you only used one drive with the raid mode switch in the on position?

Any ideas?

Thanks
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post #2 of 14
11/18/04 at 2:04pm
What version of Windows is it? XP Home or XP Pro or something else? I'm not sure if its the same in home.. but in Pro.. if you right click on my computer, and click manage. Then click on Disk Manager, does it detect the drive? Normally when hard drives are shipped, they are totally blank. The reason it won't detect it is there is no partition. If you see the drive, and it doesn't have a partition, just right click and follow the wizard to create one. After that everything should be fine. (no need to move the jumpers back to raid).
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post #3 of 14
11/18/04 at 2:26pm
Might want to hit ACTION > rescan for drives in the menu at the top, as well, but I'm a little fuzzy on the goal here....

Two separate drives rather than one RAID?
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post #4 of 14
11/18/04 at 6:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gerryf
Might want to hit ACTION > rescan for drives in the menu at the top, as well, but I'm a little fuzzy on the goal here....

Two separate drives rather than one RAID?
I run two seperate drives.. The 'RAID' in the 8790 is actually software raid. I went to redo my linux partition with a RAID 0 to gain maximum space, well, when I saw it was software, i declined to use it. I think its just that the new drive doesn't have a partition on it so it doesn't show up as a normal drive under my computer.
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post #5 of 14
11/18/04 at 6:51pm
ahh gotcha.
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post #6 of 14
11/19/04 at 1:14am
Thread Starter 
I am running XP. The disk is not seen at all in 'disk management' utility in windows.

I am trying to run the two drives in non-raid, ATA mode. Also, even though I have deselected raid on the motherboard, device manager in windows shows the promise raid 1-0 label when I click on disk drives. I tried uninstalling the driver to see if it would pick an ATA version, but it didn't.

I am stuck at this point.
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post #7 of 14
11/19/04 at 1:23am
If RAID-O was originally installed, you can not just "switch" from RAID to Non-Raid "on the fly". It requires a complete reinstall as a Non-Raid configuration.

I don't think that the RAID in the 8790 is a "software raid" - mainly because the 8790 has two HDD controllers integrated. The promise controller is a raid controller. Now... various flavors of LINUX may not like this controller or recognize it as RAID.

If you don't want to reinstall everything, reset the dip switches, reboot, hit that Control F (or what ever key combination) and have the sytem rebuild the array. You might have to format the drive; however; I'm not sure.
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post #8 of 14
11/19/04 at 1:41am
Thread Starter 
I am running XP PRO - sorry.
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post #9 of 14
11/19/04 at 2:09am
Thread Starter 
I figured (maybe incorrectly) that since I had been using only one drive prior to switching to ata mode on the switches, that it would not have been commited to Raid.
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post #10 of 14
11/19/04 at 12:24pm
Doesn't work that way. It's either configured one way or the other. This is because one controller is enabled and the other one is turned off at the time the system is initially configured.
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post #11 of 14
11/20/04 at 6:05pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by G-Omaha
If RAID-O was originally installed, you can not just "switch" from RAID to Non-Raid "on the fly". It requires a complete reinstall as a Non-Raid configuration.

I don't think that the RAID in the 8790 is a "software raid" - mainly because the 8790 has two HDD controllers integrated. The promise controller is a raid controller. Now... various flavors of LINUX may not like this controller or recognize it as RAID.

If you don't want to reinstall everything, reset the dip switches, reboot, hit that Control F (or what ever key combination) and have the sytem rebuild the array. You might have to format the drive; however; I'm not sure.
The thing is tho, when I ra the setup, it should have found it just as one drive when I had it in Raid 0, but it still found both drives. Plus, when I read up on the FastTrac100 (the controller in it when switched to raid) is a software raid... so I don't know...
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post #12 of 14
11/20/04 at 7:15pm
You are correct that if the RAID is enabled, it will "see" the drive regardless of if it is partitioned or formatted. Not sure about FastTrac100 - I thought it was "software RAID" if the O/S provided this function and not the controller. In any event it's not possible to swap between raid and non-raid without a reinstall.
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post #13 of 14
11/21/04 at 12:30pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the input. I guess I'll just use this opportunity to reorganize everything. I'll probably make it a dual-boot set-up, with one partition for audio/video, the other for general purpose things. The second drive will be for data in each category and drive image backups.

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post #14 of 14
11/25/04 at 6:51pm
I tried the same thing and it goofed up my 2nd HD. Originally, I had a 80gig drive in a USB external case. Figured I'd just plop it in the 2nd bay and be good to go since I hadn't ordered RAID. Oops. Didn't work. Same as you. Problem now is, the 80gig isn't recognized by any computers when I plug it in. Reformatting it isn't an option as it has a ton of files on it. Not all of them are important, but rather a PITA to replace. However, I've noticed that I haven't been able to find pictures from a certain frame of time and I'm thinking that they were on the 80gig drive (it *was* my backup). So hopefully you didn't have any info on your drive that you stuck in there. Or at least, if you did, hopefully it's not acting like mine is.
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