Bypassing Raid Controller on 8890

I maybe wrong, but I believe this is how you do it. You will need to disable the raid controller manually. On my 8890 an addendum sheet of instructions was inserted with the mp3 player. Basically, under the keyboard, and a metal plate under that is a very small set of switches Marked "s1". Clevo has supposedly updated the manual if you need photos....it's in section 7-23. Move both switches to the off position (opposite of where they are positioned now.) Re-assemble...boot and immediately go into the bios. Load default bios settings....save and reboot. You will now have to re-format the drives, and re-install the os as well. But - your drives should be on the regular ide controller...I think it was by intel. I did just the opposite to you, and have now enabled raid on mine.

I just re-read your first paragraph. Do you see a message during boot to press ctrl+f to set up raid? If you do - then I suspect your raid switches are turned on, but no array has been defined. I didn't even see that message until I enabled raid manually. I'm sure Adam will be more help than I am - good luck! Are you positive that the raid controllers are the cause of you conflict?

i'm not sure why u created another thread on this topic, but to anyone else reading this...the other thread is here:

http://talknotebooks.com/showthread....&threadid=9909

so duplicate answers wouldn't be made. or a mod could merge the two threads.

gizmo
My 8890 came with no OS installed, nor were the raid controllers enabled. My two sixty gb drives were auto detected every boot, and the bios was grayed out on just the primary ide controller. I did three WinXP installs that first night. First I just used WinXP's drivers...second time I used the ATA floppy that came with the laptop. Both of those produced an intel controller in the device manager...if I remember correctly. Once I had actually flipped the switch under the keyboard - the "suto detection" of the hard drives during post disappeared,...and was replaced by the ctrl + f to setup raid message during post. Additionally, the bios now was NOT grayed out on the primary ide controller.

In the other thread aussie makes two points. One - he seems to believe that regardless of driver used - the drives have to go through the "promise controller". I don't think that is correct. Because it isn't just a driver issue...particularly when you are actually changing a hardware setting via a switch. I don't know where the intel controller is on the motherboard...perhaps it is built into the 865 chipset.

Two - Aussie makes a really valid point about just trying it the way it is now. Raid makes a very noticeable difference in speed, and responsiveness. My dual 60gb 16 mb cache...5400 rpm drives installed WinXP in about 15 minutes versus 25 minutes without raid. Even sharing the bus with a firewire connection doesn't semm like it would be enough to saturate the bus. If you are feeding DV thru the firewire it would come in at approxiamtely 21,000 kbs....and yet the drives I have (slower than your 7200's) are able to transfer sustained rates of approx 33,000kps....and I would guess your raided drives should be close to 40,000kps. Which should easily handle the OS, and the streaming DV - and yet not reach the theoritical limit of 133,000 kps + of the PCI bus.

I wish I could tell you with absolute certainity that this was the case - but it was about 6 weeks ago that i first set up my 8890. Have you tried using it the way it is? If so - what was the specific error it gives you? 'you also have the option of inputing the video via the S-Video input, and they may make a component input adaptor for the cable input. I'm vary interested in how you get this resolved. - because in the future I intend to swithc from my old analog video camera to a digital one...if the wife will let me