What is a RAID controller?

Having tried to install some software which put my XP home system into a
continuous reboot, I managed to uninstall it in safe mode but my
system/device manager window is now showing a problem with SCSI and RAID
controllers. Any advice on how this may have happened and suggestions on
how to fix it would be gratefully received. The boot up sequence has also
gone from about 20 seconds to a couple of minutes (mainly while it says,
"scanning for IDE drives.................." then "No array is defined")

TIA

Rich

"Rich" wrote in message
...

"Doug Holtz" wrote in message
...
Rich;

Do you have SCSI or IDE drives? I suspect IDE and that you have a
controller like Promise or SIIG that identifies itself as SCSI to
Windows
XP. That being said, these controllers can enable a RAID set. I
haven't
played with IDE drives, but I suspect you can Mirror or just stripe data
to
both drives on an IDE RAID system (RAID 1 or 0 respectively). If you
have
2
drives and you want some protection for your data, use RAID 1 mirroring
on
the system, and the system will write data to both drives - if one
fails,
the other has the entire contents on it, so your data isn't lost.

Doug

"Rich" wrote in message
...
Having tried to install some software which put my XP home system into
a
continuous reboot, I managed to uninstall it in safe mode but my
system/device manager window is now showing a problem with SCSI and
RAID
controllers. Any advice on how this may have happened and suggestions
on
how to fix it would be gratefully received. The boot up sequence has
also
gone from about 20 seconds to a couple of minutes (mainly while it
says,
"scanning for IDE drives.................." then "No array is
defined")

TIA

Rich




as far as I am aware I only have one hard drive, which is what is
puzzling
me slightly about this and why I asked for some advice. I have done
searches and discovered that RAID is something to do with setting up HDD's
to work together in a particular way, but, like I said - I only have one
HDD, which seems to be confirmed when I use Belarc and Aida32.

(the other obvious solution of ringing Tech Support for my computers
manufacturer is unfortunately not possible, as they went bust a couple of
months after I bought it!)

Rich



Rich;

If you only have 1 hard drive, then you have an IDE controller in there and
the operating system sees it as a SCSI device.

You CANNOT have RAID with one hard drive.

Doug

Snip

looking at the info on the HDD, it is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 160GB,
which apparently has 2 disks. Would this be the reason for it trying to use
a RAID controller?

thanks

Rich

Have Fun.

Doug

"Rich" wrote in message
...

"Doug Holtz" wrote in message
...

"Rich" wrote in message
...

Snip

I hope this is clear. If you are using a machine set up by a company,
and
the controller is a Promise RAID controller, and you have an owner's
manual
for the controller, you can probably add a second 160 GB Maxtor drive
and
have a RAID set. But, you don't need it IMHO.

Clear as mud I hope

Doug


Doug,

thanks very much for your help and advice. Based on this I checked
various
settings/options and, I don't really know how or why, but it seems that
when
I had the original problem with the software a BIOS setting was altered to
tell the system to look for a RAID controller during boot up. I disabled
this and I am now back to where I was before the problem :-)

Once again, I really appreciate the time you have taken to help me.

Thanks

Rich