# Using onboard RAID as IDE?

## Kepp

Alright I've asked all around, I've read tons of websites, but I still don't know if this is possible with my motherboard. 

Alright, this Christmas I upgraded to a P4 system running an ASUS P4PE. I reformatted, put up an XP install on one of my drives, and then hooked back up my media drive.

So I have 2 hard drives on the Master IDE channel and a burner and a cdrom on the Secondary IDE channel. I have two more hard drives, one is insignificant since it's only 7 GB, but the other one is 30. I'm trying to hookup the 30 so I can install gentoo onto it. 

I haven't seen anything specifically about my onboard Promise controller, but people have told me about using a RAID setting called JBOD (just a bunch of discs) which turns the RAID channel into a regular IDE channel. I've been playing around with the RAID setup and the BIOS but have yet to figure out how to accomplish this. I tried setting up a single drive RAID array but the capacity of the 30 GB drive drops to 2.  :Sad: 

Does anyone have any experience using onboard RAID as another IDE channel? And another question if I get this setup right, what will the drive be called when I install linux? (hda.. hdb.. etc)

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## ctford0

What you want to do is to disable the raid all together and then the system treats it as if it were ide's.  On my system there is a jumper to disable the promise controller.  Then you drives show up as hde ~ hdh  i think...

Chris

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## Kepp

That sounds right and I know it's possible to use as an IDE since it 'hints' at it in the manual. But I still don't know how to completly disable RAID. There are only 3 jumpers on my mobo and no options in the BIOS.

I tried uninstalling the RAID controller driver but XP immediatly redetected on the next bootup and installed it again.

Any idea on how to disable it?

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## ctford0

There should be an option in XP's device manager to disable the device, not uninstall it.  But there has to be some way to disable your raid device, if you could post a link to your mobo's manual I would be happy to take a look.

Chris

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## rommel

XP has nothing to do with it , it is mearly responding to what hardware it sees whenn it boots , once you change the bios setting either from the promise bios or using the jumpers on the mainboard if no ssytem bios options are available windows will treat teh controller as a normal ide controller rather then a RAID controller. check the mobo manual and read the promise documentation that came with it.

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## Kepp

I went into the BIOS and Disabled the Onboard SATA/IDE RAID but now XP doesn't recognize it at all (before it saw it as a SCSI device). Any tups on making it recognize it?

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## ctford0

It should recoginize it as and ide device now.  Check your disk listings in system info. or something like that...

Chris

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## Kepp

Nothing is showing up under Device Manager. Why do they make this so hard?! They really need to implement a setting which is just "Use 3rd IDE port as regular or RAID."

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## ctford0

Since you dont really care of XP see's the other drive or not, boot up the live cd and see if gentoo finds hde...  If so then its a go, just install to it and your up and running....

Chris

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## rommel

sata is not ide raid , that is a serial ata raid controller which is completely different , you might be able to set that to base which will allow you to use it with a serial harddrive but it is not ide.

if you have an onboard promise chipset that again is different from what your talking about , the promise controller is ide and should be able to be set to either raid or plain 133 ide , you should read and learn about the hardware your running , it will help you to get the right answers and set your system up the way you want.

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