Need help setting up raid 0

I am trying to set up raid 0 and am needing some help. I have 2 80 gig wd harddrives and I have installed a utra ata/133 pci card. I have 1 harddrive hooked up to mobo and the other on the pci card. I tried to install winxp and it asked for the raid drivers (which I installed from a floppy disk) and then it went to the setup screen. Here it showed both drives and asked which one I wanted to setup. My question is shouldnt it only be showing one drive and where in the process of installing does it give me the option of raid 0, 1 etc. Am I doing this right? Thanks for your help.

Winxp home
AMD 2700
x800 pro
Abit KD7A

 

Do I need to have both drives hooked into the pci card?

 

** facepalms ** Yes.

Generally, a PCI RAID card will give you the ability to enter the BIOS for that particular card (not the motherboard, the card) when it is booting up. Promise cards, IIRC, generally ask you to press <Ctrl>+<G> or <Ctrl>+<H>.

Once you're in the adapter card's BIOS, you're given the option of creating a RAID with connected disks. If you tell us exactly the make and model of PCI card you're using, I'm sure we can give you more explicit details on the procedure.

Be aware that creating a RAID with two drives generally erases all data on that drive, and also be aware that RAID 0 setups have a risk of unstriping (generally only occurs if you update the card's BIOS) and double the risk of failure (since there's two drives to fail that can prevent data recovery). I played around with an on-board one once, and it eventually unstripped when I updated the system BIOS (and also the RAID controller's BIOS).

 

There is no option for ctrl g, h. The pci card is a generic brand from compusa--ultra ata/133 pci --the chipset says ITE8212F. Any other suggestions?

 

So I guess I am SOL?

 

Are you sure the card supports RAID? Did it come with a manual or a CD that has a pdf manual?

You can check to see what either ASTRA (not the 32-bit WIndows version, the DOS version), HWiNFO, or AIDA16 (if you can find it... I know it's still on the Ultimate Boot CD) say the device is. They should give the manufacturer and model. You can run all those from a DOS floppy.

Actually, the driver disk should have it, too, if you want to dig through the files there.

 

typically the card shows the key combo to enter the bios on screen as the machine boots up and it scans the RAID card. I do believe the Compusa boards are HighPoint controllers. Are you sure there is nothing on screen? if not, then does the manual say anything helpful at all?

 

There is no message at all upon bootup. The instruction manual doesnt say anthing about raid. I specifically asked the compusa dude if this was a good card to setup a raid with and he said yes. I should have never gone with the cheap generic branch. I am an idiot.

 

if the booklet doesn't say anything about RAID , the I'd say that you didn't get a RAID card. RAID cards almost always go through some sort of BIOS initialization and drive checking or ARRAY status checking etc..etc.. take it back and ask for someone who knows wtf they're talking about or we can direct you to purchase a quality card online.

Sorry you were inconvenienced by inexperienced retail store personnel.. it's a frustrating day for you. Take a break and call it a night.

 

Thanks for the help anyway.

 

hey, we'll be here for when you get your card ready rock-n-roll.

 

Not necessarily, I googled ITE8212F and came up with a bunch of listings for RAID setups. It looks like this chip is used on quite a few motherboards for onboard ATA RAID setups.

You could try using this driver. It's from Soltek for the onboard ITE8212F RAID chipset on one of their mobos. It may or may not work, but it's worth a try:

 

After looking through many of the pages google brought up, it looks like the only people using the ITE8212F stand alone RAID card are people who are installing Linux. Also, those are the only drivers they have on their website. They don't have any listings for Windows drivers.

http://www.ite.com.tw/productInfo/Download.html#IT8212F

 

A chipset can support RAID and standard IDE. It could be "turned" off in the one he bought.. which would make it nothing more than an IDE controller.

 

it's also a possibility that the linux folk are using a software raid driver on a cheap IDE card.
Personally this is what I would recommend
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/rr133.htm
simply because the BIOS does not store the raid information, it's on the drives. I've swapped out the PCI card for an onboard HPT370 on a mainboard replacement and the raid was still ok. Surprised the heck out of me anyway.

 

I took it back and got an ATA Raid 1200A. It is working perfectly. I should have asked the experts on this forum rather than some punk at compusa. Thanks for the replies and help.