diametricalbenz
Am on the road, so I can't check out what motherboard it is, but it is an ASUS, has 3.4ghz Pentium. There are a bunch of available slots. I do not know what software is controlling the SATA, but it did come on the CD for the mother-board. If it helps to know, I get back home Friday night, and can repsond then. I do know that I had to move the jumper on both new SATA drives from a 300 rate(?) to a 150 rate(?). I don't know enough about PCs to know what these rates are; just that I had to change the jumpers in order to have the MB recognize them. The pc is about 1.5 years old now, so there are apparantly MBs out there with a faster rate than mine.

The Adaptec is a 2940u2w, or maybe 2940uw, I think. I also have an older CD burner on the SCSI buss. I also have a DVD burner on the MB buss.

On the SCSI drive - can I load XP on it, and then somehow chose between which drive system I want to use at boot-up? How would I do that? Would I have to change the MB bios and the SCSI bios to look for the SCSI drive first?

Lastly, my new RAID is recognized as drive "F", there is no recognized drive "C", so how do I change "F" to "C".

Where can I read up on this subject, and how to do it? I know just enough to be very dangerous..........

Don't put the OS on a RAID. Put the OS itself on a single drive, which can then be easily rebuilt. Use the RAID for your user storage.

As far as I'm aware, if XP thinks it's running on drive F, you can't change that to drive C. It refuses to rename the OS drive. But having the OS on something other than drive C breaks all sorts of (broken) software.

waybomb, I would take MattL's advice and not put the system C files on the RAID array. That is something that just becomes a mess in a recovery situation and so a single drive is the best way to go. One of the bottlenecks with the 2940U/U2W SCSI since it is older is that the bus is designed to handle 40Mbits-160Mbits.

To answer your question about the SATA there is 150Mbit SATA and 300 Mbit SATA. I presume the controller on the board can take 300 but has to default to 150 to recognize the drives properly. There shouldn't be a problem there.

When you're back in town the configuration can be easily figured out once the ASUS MB model is known.

To change the boot order, go into the BIOS menu and you can change the order of the boot devices. It goes removable, CD, HDD, etc. You can expand the HDD list and move the boot drive up to the top of the list or select it somehow.

If the SCSI HDD is the only one it will boot first by default despite having a CDROM on the chain.

The C drive will always be the boot drive. You can reassign the letter drive of the RAID in the Disk Management section of the Computer Management console you can choose (d through z).

Hmmm, I spent all weekend getting ti to work. All of XP is on the RAID. So I think I know how to load XP on the SCSI, but how do I get it off of the RAID without formatting and starting all over?

Now that you guys tell me this - it really does make sense. I should have asked first.

The western digital diagnostic 11.2 now has a drive copying utility. Try booting as normal and then run the copy utility from the C (RAID) to the SCSI and then change the boot order in the BIOS as aforementioned and see if it boots up. It should work and you'll have a clone of your RAID drive.

It's a little messy so it will take some work. You'll have to make sure the RAID partition fits onto the SCSI drive.

Super tool.
Cleans LOADS more than cleaning function in XP/Explorer.
Just got rid of 800Mb
:thumbsup:

Thanks K.

Many thanks for this tip! I just dumped 1.4 gb!

Do you guys notice a speed increase when surfing the net?