I have two hard drives on EIDE. So i removed them and put them on the raid using one cable. I then put my 104 on the EIDE socket. I turned the pc on and it wont go into XP. A blue screen comes on saying somet about a problem. So i removed one of the hard drives and same message again. I removed them from the RAID and put them back on the EIDE and everything is fine. Whats wrong

Cheers

Jumpers?

What RAID card/onboard make/mdoel do you have?

Its onboard m8. Me motherborad is an ABIT

Ok, for starters you can just stick two hard drives on a raid array like that and hope they work. Raid comes in essentially two flavours, 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring). The former is where you combine two drives to be one, and the whole combination is at least twice as fast as the slowest drive in the array. Mirroring keeps a mirror image of one drive, so if it fails you have a back up.

I suspect you are interested in raid 0. This requires a fresh install of windows, as data is written to both 'halves' of the drive. So when you have changed them over, your pc is looking for data from these 'halves' and not finding it.

You need to hit a key on boot to set up a raid array, when the screen says to, and follow instructions from there.

In a nutshell, you will need a clean install and what you have tried will not work.

I installed Xp on me 80 gig hard drive and me 40 gig hard drive is empty. I installed Xp on EIDE. So that means that i have to format booth hard drives and then connect them to raid and install Xp using the raid?

Cheers

Yes. But if the two drives are not the same size, the combined raid array will only be as big as the smallest. So raid'ing your 40 and 80 gig drives will act effectively as 2 40gig drives, so you will get 80gigs of hard drive in total, so unless you are after the speed of a radi 0 array, then its not worth doing, unless the drives are the same size.

With raid, your system will throw a bit of data to one drive and then a bit to the other. Because the smallest drive is 40gig once the smaller drive reaches capacity, the free 40gig of the larger drive will remain redundant. Radi is really about speed and reliablity. You really need to use two different ide cables, one for each drive, otherwise one cable may cause bottlenecks if accessing alot of data quickly.

Right, its just i got 2 Raid slots and 2 EIDE. I have a dvdr writer on 1 EIDE and 1 Dvd/Cdr on the other EIDE. So if i get another cable and connect one hard drive to one raid and other to another raid then it should be ok

Cheers

It depends what you are trying to do. You can use raid slots to function as a normal ide channel by tweaking settings in the bios. If you want to run raid 0 then you will need two seperate cables, two seperate drives and re-format, though like I said you will lose 40 gig of space, so it hardly seems worth it to me.

If you want to use the raid channels as ide channels, ie so you can use more devices on them, then on each raid channel acting as an ide channel, you can fit 2 more devices on it. So if you want to do this, then you only need one cable with both drives attached to it; but this is not 'raid'. You are simply using the raid channel in this instance.