SATA RAID gurus.....

[Darren S]

In order to have two drives in RAID0 and an optical SATA drive plugged in at the same time - do all three devices have to be on specific ports?

I've got 6 SATA ports on my mobo, but with the large size of the twin 7900GTX gfx cards, I've simply connected the drives to the most easily accessible ports.

Therefore, I have the SATA HDDs on ports 2 and 6, with the SATA DVD-RW drive on port 5.

But I'm getting really bad installation issues of both Vista x64 and XP 64. Both bomb-out during the installation procedure with no specific error or reasoning as to why.

When I replace the SATA DVD drive with a standard PATA connection type - leaving the two SATA HDDs on their own - everything works fine.

My mobo for the record is an Asus M2N32-SLi with the latest BIOS revision.

Cheers chaps.

D.

 

[Dink]

stab in the dark but have you tried the hdd's on port 5 and 6 and sata optical drive on port 2?

 

[David]

no reason why it wouldn't work at all. check your settings in the bios, you might have to disable pata to enable the ports for the optical sata. else try removing one gcard and plugging the optical into different sata ports, if it works with another one (which it should) then either you have a setting wrong or a dud port.

 

[Gumby]

Do you have to load the motherboard sata drivers before intalling Vista (like you do in XP)? If so, try the latest ones maybe?

 

[David]

no you don't / i didn't...not sure if it gives you the option tbh...i just setup the raid in the raid bios setup and then installed vista

 

[Darren S]

stab in the dark but have you tried the hdd's on port 5 and 6 and sata optical drive on port 2?

Not yet Dink. Good idea though. I've looked in both the manual and user forums and it doesn't say anything about 'reserved' ports though. I'll probably give that a try.

no reason why it wouldn't work at all. check your settings in the bios, you might have to disable pata to enable the ports for the optical sata. else try removing one gcard and plugging the optical into different sata ports, if it works with another one (which it should) then either you have a setting wrong or a dud port.

Dave - that was the real reason behind me going down the SATA optical drive route. I wanted to disable all the IDE settings within BIOS to free up more resources for the O/S. I think similar to what Dink said above, I'll try different ports. Maybe put the HDDs on ports 1 & 2 and the optical drive on port 3.

Do you have to load the motherboard sata drivers before intalling Vista (like you do in XP)? If so, try the latest ones maybe?

That's one of the good things about Vista, it must have the default RAID drivers built in to startup. Without any drivers, it sees the RAID array all by itself and installs the O/S on it. The mad irony is that when you take the drives out of RAID and allow them to be two independant SATA drives - it needs a driver then.

D.

 

[bmh.01]

It shouldn't make a damn bit of difference which ports you use. I'd load the proper drivers during installation, it tends to cause problems like this.

Which SATA controller does the board use? Had an M2N32 ages ago but can't remember.

 

[Dink]

the reason why i said about the ports as i know when i boot my pc some sata ports are run from the northbridge and some run from the sounthbridge so you can hot swap