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Old November 18th 04, 12:00 PM
rich
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Michail Pappas wrote:
Hello all,

searched around for the following problem in Google, yet was not able to
find some good answers, so here I am (apologies in advance for the lengthy
post).

A couple of months ago I bought a brand new P4C800-E motherboard. Flashed
the BIOS to the latest version (1.016 IIRC at the time) and then
proceeded to tune the BIOS settings. I had (and still have) the following
devices:
- Maxtor 120Gb SATA hdd installed on the Intel ICH controller
- NEC 2500 DVD-R (PATA) installed also as an Ultra-ATA (PATA) device on
the same controller. IOW, I did not use the promise controller at all.

In the BIOS I configured the IDE settings to use:
- Enhanced mode, on
- S-ATA
- (Intel) RAID disabled
- Promise controller fully disabled

After that I installed Windows XP Home on the system and have been living
happily with it, till the introduction of some demanding applications
demanding on disk (plus the XP SP2, what a memory/disk hog). So I was
seeking ways to improve my disk transfer.

Then I stumbled upon the Intel application accelerator. As a test, I
installed version 2.2.2 on my portable computer, to find out that the
improvement in disk loading was immense. I wanted the same performance
boost on my Asus P4C800 system as well!

Alas, the Intel app accel was not available for Intel 875P-based mobos
(like the Asus one above). _BUT_ the Intel _RAID_ app accel _was_.

Downloaded the thingie and tried to install it in XP. No go. It was
complaining about "unsupported platform". A closer look indicated that in
order for this to run, an Intel RAID BIOS should be operating.

And here is where my trouble starts. Went into BIOS and performed the
following changes in IDE config:
- Set (Intel) RAID to enabled (from disabled)
- Doing so, makes an another option appear "Intel RAID BIOS" (or something
like that). Also enabled that one.

Tried to reboot. The initial XP boot screen came up and a couple of
seconds later the system rebooted for no reason. After some (yet more)
searching, I've found that I should possibly _first_ have enabled RAID
functionality BEFORE formatting/fdisk'ing the disk and installing Win
XP... :/ And something else: according to what I've read (even in the
mobo manual), enabling the Intel RAID BIOS, should allow me to press
CTRL+I during the bios post, in order to invoke the intel raid bios
application. This does not happen!!! Kept pressing CTRL+I yet nothing
happened.

In any case, I don't have a RAID and definitely won't have one. Just
wanted Intel RAID app accel to improve hdd performance (I've seen other
systems in a similar setup: Intel RAID BIOS active, intel raid app accel
installed and operating, but no raids, only a single disk, with very good
hdd performance).

My questions (and need all the help I can get here guys):
1) Why doesn't CTRL+I work? Something else I should do in the BIOS or
elsewhere? My guess is that I've already prepared the HDD, with the BIOS
setting for RAID set to off. Now it is set to on, the Intel BIOS does
not see any "RAID-Ready" disks and does not come into play. Ideas?

2) Assuming that I have to reformat the disk and start from scratch here,
having the Intel BIOS set to "enable", I wouldn't like to have to start
from scratch. I'd like to move my entire XP installation (lotsa files and
apps) to the new setup, can't stand to reinstall all these things. So was
thinking something like: borrowing a large disk, installing it on the
promise controller, using ghost to copy my xp disk to a ghost image on the
borrowed disk, set BIOS option for the intel controller to "RAID"+"Enable
RAID BIOS", format/fdisk my own disk, ghost restore my data back to my
disk. Will it work? Will the system boot allright in this case, or should
I expect problems of some sort? If the CTRL+I does work in this case,
should I do something in the Intel RAID BIOS application?

My specs are , with HT enabled in bios, single 512 DDR mem stick,
the two storage devices I mentioned...

Once more apologies for this lengthy post, I really don't know what to do
:/

Best Regards and thanks in advance,

Michail.-


IAA is for raid systems, you'll need a raid setup to install it. I
suspect the same is true for the Intel raid bios, it needs to detect a
raid setup to run.