Abit IC7-G motherboard with RAID problems! Please help

Hi everyone, I have an ABIT IC7-G motherboard and I have connected 4 Maxtor DiamondMax 120GB SATA\150 hard drives to it, confirured as 2 x 240GB striped arrays. I have had this set up for about 4 years allready and had no problems until one day the system would not boot. Fortunately I have another ABIT IC7 Motherboard on another system and I swapped the 2 drives containing the system (Windows XP Pro) over to it, on this system the drives were recognised and booted fine. The drives I took out would not boot in the IC7-G motherboard so I made the assumption that the motherboard was at fault. I purchased another ABIT IC7-G motherboard off of E-Bay as you can no longer purchase them new, I thought that would be the easy option as I have a socket 478 P4 2.8GHz and AGP x 8 graphics card. I have rebuilt the system with the motherboard and still cannot get the system to recognise the disks correctly in the Silicon Image RAID. I have flashed the Bios with the latest update "IC728" and done everything I know (not much) to try and get the system to work. I changed the hard drives around and connected the system disks to SATA 3 & 4 and the drives without a system on to SATA 1 & 2 on the motherboard. Then when I try and boot up I get 2 disks showing as "NORMAL" and Bootable says YES but they show up as non-RAID drives! I then I get the message to Press CTRL + S or F4 to enter the Silicon image setup utility, pressing the keys does nothing and after about 5 seconds it shows that the primary and secondary have no disks. The system then shows Disk boot error. I know that the disks are ok as they work fine on the IC7 setup, in fact that is what I am using to look for assistance on the net. Any ideas would be most welcome as I am begining to lose the plot with this system

Hi Woggo,

And Welcome to WTT. [external image: Posted Image]

RAID can be crazy-making, particularly because the complications can sometimes defeat the initial purpose and result in lost data or functionality.
I don't recommend RAID configurations for folks who can't afford to lose the data or OS that it stores.
For folk who have the luxury of improving their machine's responsiveness (while still having their important data secured elsewhere) RAID array configurations can provide a pleasant performance boost.
__________

I'm not a RAID user myself.
Experts that I consult with, who use RAID specifically for performance enhancement on their competitive rigs, have consistently suggested these two links for information about setting up RAID:

http://www.xcso.com/raid.htm
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/67628/

Best Regards

Hi Doug, Thanks for the reply and the info. I have sorted the problem and all is fine now. One of my power connectors to the disks had a broken wire on it and I didn't realise, it was only when in desperation I measured voltages with a multimeter that I found it. Only wasted 2 days on it, but you live and learn don't you. Cheers, Dave

Excellent. Glad you got is sorted.