Dell 8100 (not!) booting to an innovision Raid controller

Thanks for that Ron.  I think the issue is that I am trying to set up HW raid.  ie have a dedicated raid controller deal with the raid and the os will never know about it - is yours hw or sw raid?  I got a reply from the innovision tech support that told me to set the boot option in the machines' bios to the raid controller - but I dont have an option to boot from a raid controller and as far as I can see my dimension is at the latest bios revision (A09).

 

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that my bios is the problem - I may need to set up the os on a separate (expendable) h/d - have the machine boot to that. Then to backup the os -  store an image of it on the hw raided disks - leaving my data 

and image alone on the array... Really not what I wanted to do as i am lazy and never back my os up when I make changes (hence going for the mirrored array in the first place....)

 

:smileysad:

Hellooo.  Can you tell me what version of bios you are running?  I am running verA09 and it doesnt alow me to boot from a raid or scsi device - only hd/floppy or cd..... Grrrrr....Only thing I can think of is that your Dimension 8100 is newer than mine? Mine is a P4 133 and I bought it about 2002 (ish).... Also - I'm in the UK - maybe there are regional variations in the h/w.?...

 

In the meantime I've installed a 1gb hd to boot off - and put the array in as a data store :0(

XP sees the array fine - as one disk - and it behaves exactly as I would expect an array to behave - only thing it wont do is boot from the naffing thing....

 

 

Wendy

I have a hardware RAID mirror.  XP pro knows nothing about it.  It just thinks that there is a SCSI device, which in reality is the disk controller card.  By the way I have two Western Digitials on two separate cables on a PROMISE controller card.  They work togther well.  Under Device Manager under Disk drives, it shows up as "Promise 1X2 Mirror/RAID1 SCSI Disk Device" and there is an entry under SCSI and RAID controllers that indicates "WinXP Promise FastTrak100 TX2/TX4 (tm) Controller".  It doesn't show up under disk management.  Only the boot drive shows up there.

Hi, tried disabling the Primary IDE - no luck - still didnt present me with the option to boot from the raid controller.  I've come to the conclusion that if it is not the BIOS (coz yours is working) then it must be a Raid controller....  That'll teach me to buy the cheapest one in the shop....

My motherboard BIOS version is the same as yours.  Maybe you need to disable the primary IDE controller in the motherboard's BIOS.  Secondary one remains active and connected to CD or DVD.

Now that you mention it, I remember taking back a RAID controller of a different brand because I couldn't get it to work.  Promise is the way to go!