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I need to replace my RAID SATA PCI Card to a Non-RAID Card
The system is a Dell Precision Workstation 650 Desktop (circa 2003). It came with a 120GB SATA HDD that was connected to a Promise PCI SATA Controller Card. I've installed a 2nd SATA HDD to it and got it to see the 2nd HDD by creating an array. The HDD's are set up as Striped 1+0 RAID arrays. The only quirk is that after the SATA BIOS runs, I get a message telling me to press either F1 to Continue or F2 to enter Setup to proceed to WindowsXP Pro. The Bios on this machine is so basic that there aren't any options for the boot priority sequence and the Primary 0 and Primary 1 disks are listed as "unknown". I can't figure out how to fix it to remove that message.
Anyway, I've been reading about RAID setups and I hope that I just didn't mess up my HDD configurations with this. My goal on this PC is to have 2 independent HDD's - the first is primarily for the OS and the 2nd is for pure data storage, so if the OS crashes or fails for some reason (un-repairable virus infection or hardware related driver failures...) I can reinstall the OS with all my data in the other partitions remain safe. This is how I've set up all my IDE based systems. In what I have read about RAID, it sounds like the most basic RAID 0 (or the 1+0 that this Promise card uses) writes data across both drives, therefore, if one drive fails, ALL my data will be lost. Is this true? Am I reading the info correctly?
What will happen to all the data if I remove the 2nd HDD from the system?
I don't want to have anything to do with this RAID setup at all if this is the case. My goal for this thread is to find out how to replace the RAID PCI SATA card with a non-RAID SATA card that I want to install. The only way that I know how to install a SATA controller card is during a new install of the OS using the F6 key and the floppy, but I need to find out how to install the controller card without going thru Windows XP Setup. I thought that I could just install the non-RAID card into an empty PCI slot and reboot and install the drivers that way, but the system locks up after it sees the 2nd SATA card and the system BIOS appears.
mombodog
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January 21st, 2007 05:00
"Auto turns off the IDE interface when necessary to accommodate a controller card installed in an expansion slot."
That statement above, found in the link makes no sense at all, anyway whatever it is set to, change it to the other. There are only 2 settings, Auto and OFF
Post back what works.
JeroldL
44 Posts
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January 21st, 2007 17:00
2. For some unknown reason, I kept going back into the system BIOS to figure out that F1/F2 issue. Turns out that Primary Drive 0 and Primary Drive 1 needed to be set to OFF. I don't know why, but Primary Drive 0 was set to UNKNOWN and that was causing the message since I had no IDE HDD;s installed. I don't ever remember setting Primary 0 to Auto. Maybe it was a default setting and the installation of the 2nd SATA HDD caused the message -I don't really know.
3. I shutdown and installed the 2nd non-RAID SATA card. Upon Boot, I kept getting a BIOS not installed for the second card and it would go any further. Again, for no reason, I plugged in the 2nd SATA HDD cable into the 2nd SATA card and rebooted. It read the Maxtor HDD and went right into Windows.
4. Once in, it proceeded with the "New Hardware Wizard" and I downloaded and installed the latest drivers off the Promise site. Once the drivers installed, it immediately accessed the contents of the 2nd HDD.
5. I shutdown and removed the RAID card. It had a tiny cable that the manual states as some LED connector. The cord was too short to connect to the newly installed card, so I took it out of the motherboard.
6. Rebooted and it read both HDD's and booted right into Windows.
7. Uninstalled the PAM for the 1st SATA Card. I guess that the drivers for the 1st card are still in the machine somewhere, but I'm not going to hunt them down to uninstall. They shouldn't cause any problems.