Can I use RAID as a regular IDE controller?

chapmc · October 30th, 2002, 01:38 PM

I have a Duron 900 in an Abit KG7-raid mobo. I have a 20gb Maxtor on ide-0, and cd and dvd on ide-1. I hooked an old Maxtor 1.6gb drive on the 1st raid cable and use it for backup. I have had various problems with this arrangement. I have a removable hd that I attached on the same cable but it would corrupt the first drive so I moved it to the 2nd raid and that seemed to work ok. My problem now is that Windows 98 sees the backup drive as e: and can access it but DOS does not see it. Drive e: is an invalid drive in dos. The accessing of the drive has always been slow.

After all this my question is, can I use the raid controller for a second ide controller or is it too specialized for this? How do I do it? It is a High Point controller chip. The highpoint bios settings seem to have to do with raid formatting, type, etc.

I'm afraid I haven't done a very good job of describing the problem. Please ask me questions if you don't understand. This is very frustrating.

Thanks.

**EvilRick** · October 30th, 2002, 01:43 PM

It should just handle it as another IDE channel from what I understand. I have a KT7-A w/RAID that I didn't setup an array, just used the controller for another hard drive.

DOS may not recognize it because it's a separate controller chip.

**Whir** · October 30th, 2002, 01:46 PM

Yes, you can use the IDE RAID as a secondary, or in this case IDE2 and IDE3 controllers. I had a KT7A-R for a while and I used the Highpoint RAID controller as my main IDE channels. I put my CD-ROM and CD-RW on the normal IDE channels. Worked great.

How are you using DOS? If you are running it independently of Windows98, then it isn't seeing the drive because DOS can't see the Highpoint RAID controller. You would have to get the DOS drivers for the controller and set them up in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. If you are running it from MS-DOS prompt inside 98, then your guess is as good as mine.

All you need to do to use the Highpoint as an extra IDE controller is plug the extra hard drives into it. Don't set up anything in the RAID BIOS.

The slow access is another one I don't really have anything on. The 1.6 could be slow because it's an old drive and by nature, they are slower. I'm not sure what you're using for the removeable either, so I couldn't tell you why that would be slower. I had no speed issues with my stuff, but I have newer IBM drives.

Let us know if that helps, or if you need anything else.

-Whir

chapmc · October 30th, 2002, 02:01 PM

Thanks for the help.
I was using a win98 boot disk. I'm sure I just never noticed before that the drive was not recognized in dos. You are right, I will need a dos driver for that controller. I was just reading FAQ on Abit website and found a reply from abit saying not to use ata/33 on the raid controller. Maybe that is why the drive access is slow.

Thanks again.

chapmc · October 30th, 2002, 02:46 PM

I have looked for a DOS driver thru google, on abit and highpoint, driverguide, but I can only find Windows drivers. Where can I find a driver for DOS for highpoint hpt370 chip?

**EvilRick** · October 30th, 2002, 02:55 PM

I don't think there is one. I have looked before as well, to use with Symantec Ghost. No luck.

Barak_P · October 30th, 2002, 05:59 PM

Yeah there is no specific DOS highpoint RAID controller, you are SOL on that one. I have a highpoint RAID chip in my SOYO as well and you can use the RAID controllers as reg ide devices as well. Like what was stated earlier, it is just an old drive. Why do you need to access this drive in DOS anyway by chance?

Barak

chapmc · October 30th, 2002, 06:46 PM

If I lost windows and wanted to restore I would need to use dos. Of course I can move the hd to another controller to use it in dos so it can be done.

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who couldn't find a dos driver.

nukes · November 1st, 2002, 08:21 PM

Just check you don't get a .sys file on the floppy for he controller. Sometimes you get one to stick into your config.sys file for it to work. That's what I had to do for my CMD card.

amos · November 5th, 2002, 09:25 AM

I would go as far as advising you use the raid as another ide controller and ignoring raid opitons.

Disk sizes are now larger enough to make the extra span sizes obtained by RAID pretty uninportant. And on the whole RAID slows drive access down considerably. Mirroring is somewhat useful, but I prefer backups, and this cannot be done using a straight mirror. All a mirror will protect you against is single hard drive failure. If you want some protection against software corruption, you need a proper backup schedule. If done properly this can be used to make swappable disks anyway, so you can swap out either on drive failure, or on software corruption.

Furthermore if your motherboard goes, its much easier to swap out single drives onto a new motherboard which might not have RAID or have the same controller.