Dan said:
Just assembling a P4P800 machine. Bought 2 identical Hdds . One as master on
the primary raid connector and the other as master on the secondary. The Via
setup recognizes and supposedly sets them up for raid 1. However the BIOS
does not recognize them. What am I missing? Appreciate any help.
Dan
Most probably the problem is that the BIOS, the Award BIOS for the board as
a whole, has the VIA RAID controller turned off. You can fix this easily by
going through the BIOS pages and changing it from "disable" to "enable," or
some such.
I think maybe you need to consider whether this board will do what you want
it to do in this configuration if all you plan to use is a total of 2 hard
disks. Assuming this is your situation and you are going to mirror the
drives to contain both all your programs and your data, I would worry that
the performance (e.g. perceived speed) you will get might be suboptimal.
You would probably be better off, and have a more snappy system if you used
the 2 hard disks in the RAID 1 setup reserved for your data files, using a
separate unmirrored disk on the primary IDE channel for your programs and
operating system. Some might suggest that using 4 disks in a RAID 0+1 setup
would give you both speed and safety, but there have been some concerns
voiced about the VIA controller in this board and how slow it appears to be
in RAID 0 ("striping") configurations compared to other RAID controllers on
other boards.
Instead you might consider getting a smallish additional IDE drive to put on
the primary IDE channel and reserve that drive solely for operating system
and programs. You could back it up periodically with a disk imaging program
such as (not limited to) Norton Ghost, DriveImage, etc. Since your programs
and OS don't change that much that often, this would give you security on
your OS/programs, while still having the supposedly bulletproof safety for
your data of a RAID 1 array.
I've done basically this with my P4P800 Deluxe running W2K.
Good luck,
ken
