Tony2

I have a Giga-Byte GA-7DXR+ motherboard with an AMD 2000+ CPU. I use the onboard Promise 20276 PATA RAID controller with a pair of Maxtor drives in RAID 1 configuration. This works well and is fairly fast, no problems I have just fitted a Promise S150 SX4-M SATA RAID card with a set of Maxtor SATA disks. This sees the disks and builds a RAID 5 array ok But, when I try to boot the system, the BIOS does not recognise both controller correctly. It only sees the S150 not the onboard one. I have upgraded the MB BIOS to the latest version. I know there used to be problems with multiple Promise controllers but I thought they had fixed that. Does anyone have any information that can help me please. thanks

jmmijo Thanks for the reply. I am old and cynical :-( and used to manufacturers totally ignoring their customers pleas for help. I had completely forgotten that Promise actually do care and do help. I e-mailed them this morning and 2 hours later I had a reply. Unfortunatly they have solved the old problem of two controllers interfearing with each other, but only on the new SATA cards. So my old imbedded controller is a non starter. So, its back to individual disks, Ghost for the sys partition and a data synchroniser utility for the data partition. One step forward, one step back. Now next year ........ :-))

netdokter Promise supplies two drivers, irrespective of how you set the BIOS, if you load the ATA driver Win2k will see two disks, if you load the Array driver it will see one disk. I susspect you have both drivers in your system and a system glytch has made it reload the ATA driver. If you have a recent system registry hive backup you could reload that, or you could reload the Array driver. If you want to recreate a mirror set from one good drive you can do that safely. Connect ONE drive ONLY to the array PATA connector. Set the BIOS to RAID, power the system up and go into the setup utility - ctrl F. Write down the drive identifier and the channel number of the drive. Power down the system and connect the second drive. Go back into the Array utility. You will now see two drives, but now you will know which is which. select recreate array, you will then be given the option to mirror one disk from the other. Select the disk to mirror from, you will now understand why you did step one :-) Say yes and go to the pub. When you come back you will have a mirror pair. I have done this several times so I know it works. The time taken is roughly 100GB per hour. Good luck.