ICH6 Raid Question on P5AD2-E Premium

[dwswager]

I had two Sata drives connected to the ICH6 in normal mode. One of the
hard drives (250GB Hitachi) reported SMART as BAD. I've purchased 2
Seagate 7200.7 200GB which I would like to set up as a RAID 1 Volume.

I removed the offending drive and installed the 2 seagates. I now have
120 GB Hitachi on SATA1 (Windows already loaded and the boot drive) and
the 2 Seagates on SATA3 & SATA4 of the ICH6 as a RAID 1 voulume.

Changed the BIOS to RAID as instructed in the manual. Built the RAID
volume in the Intel BIOS utility no problem. Issue is that when I
boot, XP starts to load showing the little blue bar going across the
screen, stops and then the system reboots.

Can I have RAID and non RAIDs disk on the ICH6 controller at the same
time? (Seems like the bios utility has no problems with this.)

Are there additional drivers I need to load to get Windows XP to
understand what is happening? I knew if I wanted to establish a RAID
volume and let XP install to it, I had to load drivers.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

 

[Paul]

I had two Sata drives connected to the ICH6 in normal mode. One of the
hard drives (250GB Hitachi) reported SMART as BAD. I've purchased 2
Seagate 7200.7 200GB which I would like to set up as a RAID 1 Volume.

I removed the offending drive and installed the 2 seagates. I now have
120 GB Hitachi on SATA1 (Windows already loaded and the boot drive) and
the 2 Seagates on SATA3 & SATA4 of the ICH6 as a RAID 1 voulume.

Changed the BIOS to RAID as instructed in the manual. Built the RAID
volume in the Intel BIOS utility no problem. Issue is that when I
boot, XP starts to load showing the little blue bar going across the
screen, stops and then the system reboots.

Can I have RAID and non RAIDs disk on the ICH6 controller at the same
time? (Seems like the bios utility has no problems with this.)

Are there additional drivers I need to load to get Windows XP to
understand what is happening? I knew if I wanted to establish a RAID
volume and let XP install to it, I had to load drivers.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

When you use the BIOS setting, and change the setting from
non-RAID to RAID, it changes how the Southbridge is enumerated.
The chip either will look like ICH5 or as ICH5R.

Your 250GB boot drive has a ICH5 driver on it. When you set
the BIOS to RAID, the chipset looks like ICH5R. Maybe that is
why you cannot boot with the 250GB. (This is the stupid
chicken versus egg problem that happens if you don't install
"RAID Ready" on the Intel Southbridge.)

Now, based on that, it seems to me that doing a repair install
and F6 installing the ICH5R driver, is the only way to fix it.
Short of just reinstalling Windows on the new RAID1 volume.

Intel expects users to be mind readers, and know that if a user
_ever_ plans on running the Southbridge in RAID mode, they
should do a "RAID ready" install. That means you don't have to
use RAID right away, but it does allow a migration from a
single drive to a RAID volume later. If you were "RAID ready",
you could, for example, have cloned the 250GB to one of the
120GB, then broken the array and cloned the 120GB to the other
120GB.

ftp://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa_raid/IAAR_Quick_Start.pdf

So now, in your current situation, you will be following the
instructions to prepare a "RAID Ready" system, only you will
be doing it via a Repair Install and its F6 opportunity to
install a new (RAID) driver. Perhaps you will then be able to
mirror from the 250GB to one of the 120GB. Then, break the
array, and clone from the new 120GB, to the second 120GB, for
the final array.

Just a guess,
Paul

 

[dwswager]

Yeah, this is frustrating. I've read everything on the ICH6R chipset
from Intel and Asus and neither mentions anything about this at all.
They deal mainly with installing XP on a raid volume or creating a new
raid volume when you have XP installed on an IDE drive.

Guess the solution for now is to use the other SATA RAID controller on
the board. Guess I get to spend my night unmounting and remounting
drives all over my full tower case so all the cables reach the right
drives.

Thanks for your reply!