Raid control issue.

[onebadmudder]

I nade a mistake and bought a HP machine for the kids computer. It came with 4 SATA ports, and 1 IDE port. I have 2 CD roms taking up those 2 slots. The HP machine had media center edition on it. I did not use it and did not like it.

I have 1.5 gig of ram and it is a P4 3.06 CPU. I installed a Ultra ATA-133 Raid card because I have 10+ Ide HDD paving around and have the 3 computers networked, so I figured I could deep store data on these 4 HDDs. I finally got it up and running, but it was unstable, and seamed to drop drives at random.

Finally I had it with the spyware and useless software with the HP MCE package, and Reformatted the SATA drive with partion magic, and just put on XP PRO SP2. The PC is much more stable. But I can not get it to Boot at all when the Raid card is pluged in. I installed all the drivers that are on the cd that came with it. I did read on a site about booting and using a floppy drive, but this maching does not have one.

Any one have an idea what I can load to let XP read this card and the HDDs atached to it? All the IDE ports on the other machines are full.

ThanX

 

[Nodsu]

"not get it to Boot at all" means what? The computer doesn't power on? It hangs at POST? It hangs at boot? It hangs while loading Windows?

Mind you, your PSU may not be powerful enough to spin up half a dozen hard drives at once.

 

[onebadmudder]

"not get it to Boot at all" means what? The computer doesn't power on? It hangs at POST? It hangs at boot? It hangs while loading Windows?

Mind you, your PSU may not be powerful enough to spin up half a dozen hard drives at once.

It hangs after the intial drive check, when it used to display the raid drives with the F3 prompt. I just get a blinking cursor. It never makes it to the 1st windows screen.

I have run this many drives on this power supply before. I have 7 cooling fans on it, because all the HDD makes it very hot inside the case.

 

[Nodsu]

Well, if it dies before booting, then WIndows or any drivers have nothing to do with anything. By the looks of it, the RAID BIOS hangs. You have a hardware or a BIOS settings problem.

Maybe try the controller card in another slot or with a different combination of drives (double-check the master-slave settings and replace the IDE cables with known good ones?). In BIOS, disable all unused devices like serial and parallel ports to free up some IRQ and DMA space.