What is a RAID controller?

[Rich]

Having tried to install some software which put my XP home system into a
continuous reboot, I managed to uninstall it in safe mode but my
system/device manager window is now showing a problem with SCSI and RAID
controllers. Any advice on how this may have happened and suggestions on
how to fix it would be gratefully received. The boot up sequence has also
gone from about 20 seconds to a couple of minutes (mainly while it says,
"scanning for IDE drives.................." then "No array is defined")

TIA

Rich

 

[Doug Holtz]

have puzzling
me slightly about this and why I asked for some advice. I have done
searches and discovered that RAID is something to do with setting up HDD's
to work together in a particular way, but, like I said - I only have one
HDD, which seems to be confirmed when I use Belarc and Aida32.

(the other obvious solution of ringing Tech Support for my computers
manufacturer is unfortunately not possible, as they went bust a couple of
months after I bought it!)

Rich

Rich;

If you only have 1 hard drive, then you have an IDE controller in there and
the operating system sees it as a SCSI device.

You CANNOT have RAID with one hard drive.

Doug

 

[Rich]

mirroring into

Rich;

If you only have 1 hard drive, then you have an IDE controller in there and
the operating system sees it as a SCSI device.

You CANNOT have RAID with one hard drive.

Doug

Doug

when I use Aida 32 it gives the following details (amongst many others!)
though these ones mention RAID and/or IDE.

PCI Devices

Bus 0, Device 15, Function 0 Promise PDC20276 MBFastTrak133 Lite IDE RAID
Controller

Bus 0, Device 17, Function 1 VIA VT82C571 IDE Controller


If I shouldn't have Raid then should I disable any reference to it in the
BIOS (I have a choice of RAID or ATA on one section) or am I asking a
question that is too involved and/or specific to my own computer?

If the HDD is IDE, should the system be seeing it as SCSI?


If this is too complicated to go into on a NG, then thank you very much for
the time you have given to help me and I will try to find out some more tech
details for my system and take the plunge to try and restore it to its
former glory with a reformat or some other drastic step!


thanks,

Rich

 

[Rich]

Snip

looking at the info on the HDD, it is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 160GB,
which apparently has 2 disks. Would this be the reason for it trying to use
a RAID controller?

thanks

Rich

 

[Doug Holtz]

Have Fun.

Doug

Doug,

thanks very much for your help and advice. Based on this I checked various
settings/options and, I don't really know how or why, but it seems that when
I had the original problem with the software a BIOS setting was altered to
tell the system to look for a RAID controller during boot up. I disabled
this and I am now back to where I was before the problem

Once again, I really appreciate the time you have taken to help me.

Thanks

Rich