please help! In BIG trouble

[Dave_McMahon]

Hi

I have an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard and it don't work Don't care!

it uses the promise 20378 Raid controller

Do care about the 300GB Raid 1 Array on it with my ****** life on it (good time to call me sad)

Can i remove the disk and just connect it via ATA? Can I use my promise Fast Trak100 TX2 controller with the PDC20270 Chip?

Gonna do a youtube of the thing (MB) on fire once this **** is over.

p.s Will get PCI Raid cards after this (two identical ones)
T

 

[choirbass]

looks like all you would need to do, is acquire a raid controller that contains the exact same raid controller chipset that was on the motherboard (since it seems your motherboard is dead now), that way you shouldnt need to format the hdds to make them usable again (you might not have to format them anyhow if you use them individually, thats just speculation on my part)

get a third large hard drive to host the OS on... and then attach the 2 current hdds that are in raid 1, and extract all the data you need from them... and then proceed to use them as individual seperate hdds... ...raid 1 is not meant to protect your data any more than a single hdd would really, its just there to reduce the down time you might have, such as if you were running a server that needed to always be running, whichcase, raid 5 would be a better option

if you want data redundancy, get about 5 or more seperate hdds, and duplicate the data to all of them (making regular backups as well)... some of them can be external, some can be networked, some can be internal... and you can also write the data to dvds and such if you wanted to

 

[Dave_McMahon]

Can anyone supply a list of devices that use the 20378

so far I found

(MY board Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
P4P800 (-E?) Deluxe

And an old crap MSI Board with cracker toy capcitators (would never buy an MSI) (SDRAM!)

and a Rambus board nuff said.

I might just have to buy another P4C800-E

 

[choirbass]

short of purchasing new hardware... have you tried connecting either hdd to a pata channel?...

raid 1 isnt like raid 0 in this respect... ...with raid 0, if one hdd fails, all the data is rendered completely useless... in raid 1 however, if one hdd fails, you might only get a warning... as far as i can tell though, your controller failure would be akin to a single hdd failure... where the other hdd in the array would still be functional with all the data intact (or in this case, both hdds are functional, but the controller is damaged)

you should try hooking up either hdd to a seperate computer on an open pata channel, and see if you can extract the data from a single drive that way, mounting it as just a storage hdd to get the data off of, or at least so you can have access to whats on the hdds again, without resorting to formatting them

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Do care about the 300GB Raid 1 Array on it with my ****** life on it (good time to call me sad)

Can i remove the disk and just connect it via ATA? Can I use my promise Fast Trak100 TX2 controller with the PDC20270 Chip?

If the array was RAID 1, you should have no problem. Just hook one of the drives that was in the array up to a new motherboard or a different computer as if it was a single drive. All your data should be visible.

Most RAID 1 implementations do not do anything special to the drives that make them unreadable as a single drive (one of the distinct advantages of RAID 1 over other redundant RAID levels).

 

[Dave_McMahon]

ok pucker up I need to kiss you guys (not gay)

Will try to connect one of the drives. Should I connect the Master or slave?

 

[choirbass]

it wont matter which you connect, since they both contain identical data

essentially, theyre both master, and theyre both slave (if that makes any sense)... the most likely worst case scenario here, is that you would run into jumper problems (making the computer freeze during post)... ...so, if the main bootable hdd is the other computer is configured as a master hdd (or is using cable select), you would want then connect one of your 2 hdds as either a slave, or use cable select (assuming youre using the same ide channel)

im probably making this sound more complicated than it needs to... basically just try to avoid jumper problems

 

[Dave_McMahon]

In the controller one drive is Master and one is Slave (because they share the PATA cable.

Gonna risk connecting the drive soon!

Wish me luck!

Well I have connected the drive VIA USB box and it works ok phew! Gonna get a new PC tomoz (and see my cute girlfriend as well)