Raid Help!!!

i have put together my new comp i have a abit KD-7 RAID motherboard
AMD Athalon 2000 XP processor 2 80 gig 7200 rpm western digital HDs

there are 4 40 pin EIDE slots 2 of which are regular other 2 are for mass storage and are yellow these can be used for raid

well i connected all power and ribbons booted it up
the bios couldnt detect the HDs but the raid i was able to set up an array
i set it for raid 0 for stripping performance

and all looked good
but when i rebooted bios didnt see the hds

i have the hds set to cable select
no master no slave
basicly because they were in 2 different slots
i tried to look into this further but no luck

anyone have any
by the way i have set it to normal in the 1 and 2 slots till i can use the raid and 3 and 4 slots

thanks

Have you checked the cables? Connected correctly? Any pins bent?

Can it detect a single drive by itself?

How about drivers for your board? I have seen RAID firmware that is really old cause disk detection flakeyness as well as old BIOS revisions. Are you up to date on all of these?

Another thing to consider is to do software RAID in W2K. It is VERY easy to setup. If you'd like, I can post a step by step on this thread. Obviously you wouldn't need to use the RAID slots on your board to do this.

Hope this helps!

First of all - since this board is a RAID board I must make a wild assed guess that the board has a built in RAID interface, (the yellow slots) and as such if you connect drives to it you will not detect them on the BOIS since that is not aware of "SCSI-like" interfaces or the devices that attach to them. That would explain why you can't see the drives on the Boot screen but you can configure a RAID array from the configuration software.

It is also symptomatic of dropping and Adaptec RAID controller into a system. You must disable the IDE drives, (unless you use them as Boot drives), and leave the Adaptec RAID controller to manage the RAID Array itself.

some versions (KD7-G and KD7-S) of the KD-7 come with Serial ATA 150 (some version S ATA raid 0,1) so those extra connectors could be for serial ata drives. You can use these drives in a raid array with for example the Abit KD-7-G.

You should test if your mobo can see the HD's operating in non-raid.
Then move to a raid config. Like said above you do not see the drives appearing in the normal IDE bios when you choose for the raid array.

-> To install S-ATA raid see chapter 5 of the Abit KD7 manual

The KD7-G supports stripped (raid 0) and mirrored (raid 1) raid set. Stripped increases performance (parallel read-write) while mirrored offcourse creates an instand backup of all your files all the time. You need to connect two identical drives capable of S-ATA 150 to the serial ata raid connectors with the special cables and connector pieces that come with the mobo. Reboot, while booting press CTRL+F4 to enter the menu.
You can now add a Raid array.

Perhaps your board came with RAID on the normal IDE ATA too? Well then the procedure is similar. Connect the drives to the connectors meant for the raid array, reboot while rebooting press ctrl+F4 go into the advanced setup and choose raid, add a raid config, create raid array. If you choose for data mirror (raid1) you need to choose a source disk, do not mistake cause you will overwrite the destination drive! If you choose data stripping all data on both disks will first be deleted and afterwards you will be able to parallel read-write to the disks.

--- Offcourse 'playing' with all those settings and your disks is at your own risk... so don't blame me for data loss or damage. ---