ASUS M2N-E Motherboard + new to SATA

coded1 · nFHQ Member

Hi,

I recently got this ASUS M2N-E Motherboard with 2 sata hard drives both of which have win xp pro w/sp2, i swap them via a hard drive rack. I intended 1 for games and the other for work.

I took the old ide storage drive from an old pc and combined it with these as a slave for storage for it had my passwords and other docs on it.

When I installed bare XP on both of those sata drives i proceeded to setup some additional software on 1 of them, then things started getting screwy. So after awhile of frustration with this drive I took it out and plugged in the other sata, done some stuff there then went back to the screwy drive BUT everything is fine, it fixed itself, but, it is a mirror image of the other sata drive and all my password files and docs that were on that ide slave are gone.

I dont recall setting-up any raid drivers but these drives are staying in sync, although they are swapped in and out via the rack.

QUESTION: Can i boot from these sata drives like i do now only remove that ide slave to keep the sata drives from communicating ??

Thanks

wonkanoby · Ultra nForced

your not connecting 2 versions of xp to the board at the same time?

coded1 · nFHQ Member

No. I bought 2 80gig sata drives knowing nothing about RAID to swap them back and forth as the boot drive...mobile hd rack

but i've done away with the rack now I have

1 sata drive with win xp pro

1 ide drive that is installed as a blank slave and allows me to boot the sata drive

and 1 sata drive that is blank now

3 drives - 2 sata and 1 ide

I want to do a raid 1 with both sata drives and scrap the ide but as of now I can't boot without the ide.

Any ideas ? A good step by step guide on setting up RAID, maybe.

I've been up with this thing for 3 days now, I start web developing class the 21st this month, thats why i built this.

wonkanoby · Ultra nForced

and allows me to boot the sata drive

i suggest you do a clean install of xp with only

1 x sata and cdrom in there

as it sounds like windows has written the mbr to the ide drive

wonkanoby · Ultra nForced

if you want raid 2x sata plus cdrom

to get in the raid bios on my board is f10..read your manual

but there create a raid 0 i assume array

in bios boot order set the array as bootable drive....read manual

as xp install starts f6 and put in raid driver floppy

as i recall there were 2 drivers to go in

coded1 · nFHQ Member

Hi wonkanoby,

Well i found instructions in my mobo manual to create raid 1. Spent like 4 hours trying it, created the driver floppy, hooked-up just the sata drives and the two dvd drives and floppy, enabled the correct options in the bios. For hours I checked and re-checked with book in hand so since web developing class is around the corner I said "I at least want to get rid of the ide drive and only use the satas" I reverted the bios settings so it saw the 2 satas, sata 1 & 2 and then proceeded to install windows.

I started the installation of windows and where it wants to format, it saw both drives C, D. Formatted C and installed windows, But you know where the installation asks for the time zone etc. it didn't ask. After that was done it started to format D about 30% into that I said #$@! with it, cut the power and crawled into bed.

I woke-up today after a good sleep, coffee, and went right back to it. I turned the computer on and it went right back to the installation format screen showing drive C complete but showing D raw. So I selected D and formatted that. This time during installation windows asked me for the time zone etc.

Well now it it booting into windows fine. I wanted to see which drive I was booting from, so I looked and drive C is blank and drive D holds the windows files. This setup looks like it did when I had the ide drive in, so I suspect it willkeep mirror images. From what I read, this sounds exactly like raid 0, which is ok, but it confuses me because I disabled the raid controller,I read raid 1 wont give xp a real great performance boost anyway and school and...I'll leave it for now.

I will get 2 new sata drives latter and see to this raid 1.

Thanks wonkanoby

coded1 · nFHQ Member

Just remembered somethin..

I should be able to now connect an additional drive just for storage now, shouldn't I ?

wonkanoby · Ultra nForced

raid 1 offers no performance boost

you cannot be in raid 1 if you disabled the raid controller

coded1 · nFHQ Member

No...i said the setup that I had before with the ide as a slave would put a mirror image of one disk onto another and that's the same setup thay I have now except instead of the ide drive I now have a sata...I know it's confusing and difficult comprehend. It took me hours of this stuff until I said... ENOUGH!

Because in raid 0 one drive is redundant and mirrors your main drive and although I had raid disabled this was happening. Remember, I had that hd rack to swap boot drives but the ide drive was always there, and whenever I swapped the boot drives the system would mirror, sync exactly the bootable drives that I swapped.

See confusing since it was behaving like raid 0 when it was turned off.

coded1 · nFHQ Member