RAID1 setup help - Biostar MCP6P M2+
please excuse my raid newbie-ness, but i'm at a loss here. i've built plenty of computers before, but this is my first time attempting to set up a raid array. i have built-in raid on my board, biostar MCP6P M2+ (phoenix-award bios), and i'm just looking to set up two identical 500g SATA drives in a raid1 array for redundant storage. i have a third 120g SATA drive with my OS on it (XPpro). the machine boots and runs windows just fine with raid disabled on the board, but as soon as i enable it i lose the ability to boot from my third drive. it seems to be forcing me to boot from the array, and my third drive is not even a boot option once raid is enabled on the board. if i go back and disable raid, the third drive once again shows up as the preferred boot drive. biostar's documentation is pure crap...the manual tells me all about raid, but not a single morsel of info on HOW TO SET IT UP!! wtf?? one other thing to note, i DO NOT see a raid controller listed under device manager...am i missing something? with raid enabled on the board, if i go into raid setup, it seems to properly display the array and says it is healthy...i just can't seem to boot from my third drive no matter what settings i try.
anyone have this same board? anyone successfully set up raid1 on this board? what am i missing? anyone? anyone? bueller?
thanks in advance!
anyone have this same board? anyone successfully set up raid1 on this board? what am i missing? anyone? anyone? bueller?
thanks in advance!
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You need to enable Raid and create any arrays you want. If you want Windows on a non Raid drive, then it needs to be a "non member" of any array, just leave it connected. Then you have to install Windows on this drive, but while the controller is in Raid mode (thus you need to probably use a USB Stick with the driver on it during install).
Now, if the bios lets you set Raid mode on specific ports, then make sure only the ports you have the 2 drives on are in Raid mode. Then what you have now should work.
thanks for the info. when i enable RAID in bios, it gives me four drive options to individually enable: primary 1, secondary 1, primary 2, secondary 2. there are 4 SATA ports, one used by my DVD-RW, one by my 120g OS disk, and two used by the 500g drives. no where else in the BIOS does it refer to these drives as primary or secondary...just drive 0,1,2,3 (2 and 3 being the 500g drives i'm trying to RAID). i enabled secondary 1 and 2 and rebooted and that got me into the RAID setup where the array appeared healthy...but no boot. back into bios and my OS drive is gone from boot drive list and only the array shows up. i tried running windows setup AFTER enabling RAID thinking maybe it would give me the option to install on a third, non-raid disk, but it told me there were no disks available to install to. i tried enabling all disks and same thing. OS drive does not show up as bootable option in bios.
is this maybe just a port issue? how can i determine which port is which?
Are you installing Windows 7? If yes, then when you get to the screen that shows any drives available to you need to click "load driver" and have the raid drivers provided by the mobo manufacturer on a USB Stick.
Also, you said your single drive is not in the boot list. Does this board, by chance, have 2 sections under the boot order? 1 being the actual boot order, the other listing all the HDD's in the system? If yes, go to that HDD listing and make sure the single drive is first. Then it should be appearing over in the boot order section.