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Old May 30th 04, 12:34 PM
Jan Kalin
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In article , Nikolaos Tampakis wrote:
Jan Kalin wrote:
Hello,

I have a GA-7DPXDW-P MB and was wondering if is it possible to "upgrade"
the RAID on this MB to enable full RAID 0+1 configuration. I have 4 120GB
disks that I'd like to mirror and stripe, giving me fast 240GB of mirrored
disk.

I have been searching round the net and found something that might be of
help. On http://www.anycities.com/user/treiber/ there's a link to "20276
2.00.0.28 Full Raid" Promise ROM. I presume this is what I need, but I am
not sure how to actually burn the changed ROM.

I understand German, so I will read through the
http://lumberjacker.kettenfett.com/ (from where the link originates) and
hope to find more information there, but
I was wondering it anyone here has preformed this operation on this board.
Any hints, tips, pointers to information or a review of the procedure will
be very much appreciated.

Cheers, Jan


The RAID controller's firmware is merged as a module into the main
motherboard BIOS. Assuming it's an award BIOS there are utilities to
manipulate its structure/modules (cbrom, modbin - basically you need
cbrom here).
Using cbrom, you would release the existing RAID module from the
motherboard's BIOS file and then inject the full RAID Promise ROM file.
There could be two modules in the motherboard BIOS though - one for
simple ATA operation and one for RAID operation. You should replace the
RAID one obviously.
Assuming the Promise ROM is correct for the 20276 chip that's all you
need do BIOS-wise.
(in the case of ATA100 Promise RAID, the available ROMs from fasttrak
controllers were for the PDC20267 chip which promise used on their PCI
RAID controllers, and this had a different ID from the PDC20265R chip
which was given to motherboard makers for onboard implementations - this
required a slightly hacked Promise ROM. I think however that the
PDC20276 is common to both motherboards and Promise ATA133 PCI RAID
cards so this should be straighforward).
Make sure you install correct drivers for the new ROM version too, if
required.

http://www.stormpages.com/crazyape/downloads.html

This deals with the older PDC20265R bus has some useful stuff.


Thank you for the information. In the end I've decided not to mess around
with BIOS - I cannot afford to muck up the computer as I have rather a lot
of work and don't want to risk too much downtime. I'll be getting a
Promise TX2000 controller that does RAID 0+1 without any trickery.

Cheers, Jan

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