Disabled Promise RAID, can I still use the IDE slot?

[Tommy]

I have an Albatron PX865PE ProII motherboard, I disabled the Promise
IDE RAID controller because I lost my stripe. To be on the safe side,
I would just like to use the 2 IDE slots to mount 2 drives. When I
boot up though, I can't find the drives, even in the disk manager.
What am I missing?

TIA!
t

 

[Jim]

I have an Albatron PX865PE ProII motherboard, I disabled the Promise
IDE RAID controller because I lost my stripe. To be on the safe side,
I would just like to use the 2 IDE slots to mount 2 drives. When I
boot up though, I can't find the drives, even in the disk manager.
What am I missing?

I'm not familiar w/ that particular mobo implementation, BUT in general, you
do NOT want to disable the IDE controller in the BIOS. This is effectively
pretending the controller does not exist, which is why it's never seen in
the OS (nor even the BIOS boot screen). Instead, what you do is keep the
controller enabled, but define a "single HD spanned array"! IOW, if I have
a single HD and attach it to one of the IDE slots on the controller, I
configure that channel as a spanned array, only it happens to only have one
HD in that array.

Not all brands of RAID controllers will work this way, but most do.

Jim

 

[Tommy]

Thanks for the reply. With a spanned array though, it still splits the
data across the 2 drives though right? Therefore, if one drive goes
down, I lost the data in both? I want to use them as if they were 2
regular(separate) drives. In Promise's BIOS utility (FastBuild), I can
only find and autobuild screen where it will allow RAID 0 or 1 only.
Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[Jim]

Thanks for the reply. With a spanned array though, it still splits the
data across the 2 drives though right? Therefore, if one drive goes
down, I lost the data in both? I want to use them as if they were 2
regular(separate) drives. In Promise's BIOS utility (FastBuild), I can
only find and autobuild screen where it will allow RAID 0 or 1 only.
Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

You're missing my point, let me try again.

I took the liberty of downloading the Promise RAID MBFastTrak 133 Lite User
Manual (
ftp://211.78.163.2/product/it/mb/PDFzip/Manual/English/RAID_EM_A1.zip )

Notice on the bottom of page 56, it mentions FOUR different modes for your
defined arrays (Striping, Mirroring, Mirroring & Striping, and Spanning).

IOW, what the reference to Spanning is telling you is that you can use that
Promise controller to treat ONE or more HDs (up to four, since that's the
controller capacity, of course) as "spanned", or what's sometimes called
JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives). If you define a span, then all HDs defined
in that spanned array are treated as a single *logical* HD. IOW, if you had
a 30GB, 100GB, and 10GB HD on three IDE ports, you could create a spanned
array of all three HDs and it would appear to the OS/system as one, big
honkin' 140GB HD! Note, this is NOT a Stripe. In a Stripe, data is spread
evenly across multiple HDs. A spanned HD is simply treated as contiguous
space, space will be allocated to the next HD only once the current HD is
exhausted.

That said, notice that nothing prevents you from defining ONE HD as
spanned!!! That's the key to understanding how to define a single HD on one
IDE port. IOW, if you want four HDs, one on each IDE channel, master &
slave, to be just like a plain, ol' everyday non-RAID IDE controller, you
simply define FOUR spanned arrays in the setup, each w/ one HD.

Capesh?

Yeah, it's sort of ridiculous to make you go through all that work just to
get up to four single HDs configured on the IDE controllers, but that's the
way Promise does it. Other controllers, like those from Intel or Highpoint
don't make you do this. They assume unless defined as an array
specifically, the attached HD should be treated as a single non-RAID HD.

Jim

 

[kony]

Thanks for the reply. With a spanned array though, it still splits the
data across the 2 drives though right?

Only if you assign both drives to the same array. If each
drive is a separate array, each separate spanned array is
same thing as single drive.

herefore, if one drive goes
down, I lost the data in both? I want to use them as if they were 2
regular(separate) drives. In Promise's BIOS utility (FastBuild), I can
only find and autobuild screen where it will allow RAID 0 or 1 only.
Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

Do not disable the raid controller, re-enable it.
Enable/disable is for the entire drive controller, "raid" is
only an adjective describing one of it's features.

Once controller is enabled again, after the BIOS POST screen
press the key shown onscreen to enter the RAID bios menu.

One the menu, each drive should be shown as a single drive
span. If they are not, assign each drive as a single drive
"array" in spanned mode, not striped. Both drives should
not be members of the same array.

I'm not familiar with "fastbuild", see if you can just
assign the drives.

 

[Tommy]

I know what you're getting at, I'm asking the question because I saw
this:

"If any one drive in the JBOD-type array fails, the whole array fails
and all data on it is lost"
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raid.htm

Either way, FastBuild doesn't seem to allow me to build it that way.

 

[Tommy]

Thanks, I'm gonna see if I can flash the BIOS. FastBuild is not giving
me these options.