Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (
More info?)
Hi Paul
Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes I do see the message from the RAID card
BIOS that you described, and I am able to see that both Maxtor 120 GBytes
disks, connected to the PCI card via seperate IDE cables, are visible in
the message. I believe I have successfully build a RAID mirror between
the two, and whilst installing Windows XP from afresh (using F^ and a
floppy containing the RAID driver for Windows XP), the installation
routine reports that the C: drive has around 114 Gbyte of storage
available. I believe this means that the RAID BIOS is working fine, and
that the Mirror has been correctly setup. However, I only have a DVD
writer on the original IDE controllers, and the only boot devices I see
are either the floppy drive or the DVD writer. There is a setting in the
motherboard BIOS under BOOT, for other boot devices, which I have set to
Yes. I also made sure that the RAID Mirror has a little diamond symbol
next to it, which is supposed to denote that the it is to be bootable,
and I set the pair of disks as raid device 0. My problems seems to be
that the the ASROCK BIOS is not detecting the disks attached to the PCI
card as a bootable option, although the mirror itself is visible. This
means that unless bootable media is placed in either the floppy or DVD
drive, the system cannot boot. The RAID mirror is not considered a
bootable device, although the RAID mirror is available as the C: drive,
once the system has booted from either the floppy or DVD drive. I thought
this might have been fixed with the latest ASROCK motherboard BIOS, but
apparently even version 2.50 behaves the same.
I believe that there is a K7S8XE+ version of this motherboard, which has
SATA(rather than IDE) RAID built onto the motherboard. Does the BIOS on
this motherboard have an extra choice/option to make the RAID disks an
option to boot off, and if so shouldn't my setup be similar in
implementation to that provided by ASROCK. Has anyone ever got a third
party disk controller (IDE, SATA or SCSI) to work with this motherboard,
or will I have to return and give up using RAID.
Ratty
nospam@needed.com (Paul) wrote in
news:nospam-0909040515140001@192.168.1.177:
> In article <Xns955F398F4B2EAratfink123mailcom@130.133.1.4>, Ratty
> Burger
><ratfink123@mail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a K7S8x motherboard, and I want to install a pair of hard
>> disks in RAID format. I have installed a Innovision DM-8401R PCI
>> card, and have setup a pair of hard drives in a raid format. I then
>> tried to install Widows XP Pro, and everything is going well until
>> the system tries to reboot, as the raid card and it's hard disks are
>> not visible within the IOS as a boot option. The motherboard came
>> with version 2.20 of the BIOS, and I have upgrade to the latest
>> version, 2.50, but I don't see anyplace to change the boot order to
>> use the RAID card first. I have set the option to try other boot
>> devices to yes, but all i get is the option for the floppy or DVD
>> drive, all hard disks are attached to the RAID card
>>
>> Many thanks
>
>
http://www.ivmm.com/eio/products_dm8401r.html
>
> Uses ITE IT8212F RAID controller. (This is the same controller used
> on some of the latest Asus motherboards as a bundled controller.
> Perhaps on the Athlon64 motherboards ?)
>
> The PCI Card will have a controller BIOS on it, to run the card as
> a RAID controller, or as a vanilla PCI IDE controller. There are two
> download sections on this page:
>
>
http://www.iteusa.com/productInfo/Download.html
>
> For the product to be recognized, the RAID BIOS firmware on the
> PCI card, has to be loaded by the Asrock BIOS. You should see
> something like this on the BIOS screen, if the IT8212 BIOS is running:
>
> "IT8212 RAID BIOS V1.7.1.91 F/W Ver 02093030
> Copyright 2002-2004 ITE, Inc. All Rights Reserved
>
> Please wait for IDE scan..
> Drive 0: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
> Drive 1: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
> Drive 2: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
> Drive 3: <whatever drive is connected there> <which array it is in>
>
> Press <Ctrl-F> or <Ctrl-E> to enter Setup Utility... etc."
>
> If you aren't seeing this, then AFAIK the necessary services won't
> be there for the BIOS, so you won't be able to boot from the card.
> It is possible you can still use the connected drives as a data array,
> by installing the Windows driver, after Windows is booted. If that
> doesn't work, it implies a PCI incompatibility, even though ITE claims
> the chip is PCI 2.2 compatible.
>
> The conventional wisdom from forums.2cpu.com, is to disable any other
> controllers that load their own BIOS code, on the chance that two
> controllers together are asking for too much of the low 640K memory
> at boot time. I have no idea what hardware is on a K7S8X that might
> be conflicting, but perhaps that will give you an idea.
>
> Apparently, some server motherboards have an option in the BIOS
> with the word "EBDA" (extended BIOS data area, that chunk of 640K
> used for the BIOSes) in it. The server motherboard has an alternate
> arrangement of memory map for the low 640K of memory, that is supposed
> to make it easier to run add-in controller BIOS. This option just
> doesn't seem to exist on desktop boards.
>
> I have a feeling, since this question is asked over and over again,
> that getting third party controllers to work, is just not a priority
> with motherboard makers. I'm sure there are standards somewhere as
> to how it is supposed to work, and it probably wouldn't take a rocket
> scientist to make a display in the BIOS to show how messed up the
> allocation of memory is down in 640K country. But since SCSI chips
> stopped shipping on motherboards, I think the joy of making this
> type of stuff work, is gone from the minds of the motherboard makers.
>
> While you could waste your time trying to contact Tech Support (at
> either the mobo or controller companies), I doubt they'll have any
> really useful suggestions as to how to get it to work.
>
> So, easiest solution is to try to use it as a data-only array,
> by installing the Windows driver.
>
> Good luck,
> Paul
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