Please help. No drives showing in raid bios - urgent help needed (GA-8I915P-Duo)

[gertcher]

Hi All

My first time here, and my first time with a raid quested ever. Been building computers since 386 days so know my way around most systems

This is a clients computer with a Gigabyte GA-81915P MB and 2x Maxtor 200GB hard drives. The computer was working with Win XP Pro until they installed backup software from an old computer. The backup was a mirror image of the old hard drive and installed to overwrite a partition. It has not worked since.

In my attempts to make corrections I am now at the following position:
Both drives have been reformatted to NTFS using another computer, each without a label or drive letter and both have a single active healthy partition, no operating systems have been installed. Nothing on the bios has been altered.

When I attempt to set up a raid 1 the raid bios does not show any drives and does not respond to any function under any of the 5 options except to say, ' there is an error try another option' or something like it. I have tried the long install version, even have the drivers on a floppy but get to the windows install and still no drives showing, then get the dreaded blue screen with a long error message, and have to reboot. Done several permutations over half a day and got nowhere.

I bet I have missed something simple, but what is it?

Would very much like to get this sorted today and give the computer back on Tuesday, I am away for a few weeks after that

Thanks  Greg

[absic]

Hi there,

I'm not sure as to your exact Mobo as a the nearest I can find on the Gigabyte site is GA-81915P-Duo I hope this is the correct board.

Checking through the instructions for setting up RAID on this board you need to set the following parameters in BIOS:

On-Chip Primary PCI IDE [Enabled]
SATA RAID/AHCI Mode [RAID]
Then further down in the list you need to enable the Onboard H/W RAID (It could be easy to miss this setting)

I hope it is that simple but if it isn't can you confirm full mobo model.

ATB

[gertcher]

I'm not sure as to your exact Mobo as a the nearest I can find on the Gigabyte site is GA-81915P-Duo I hope this is the correct board.

You are probably right, I just read the name of the MB from the manual. It does cover a number of boards in the range.

The panic is over, the supplier of this (2nd hand) computer had included all the original disks including the drivers he had put on to a floppy. This floppy was missing from the pack I was given along with the computer when I was fixing it. I collected the floppy from my client this morning and got the computer working without a problem.

Thanks for your input. It does look like there was/is plenty of confusion over RAID set up prior to Vista, I am glad I don't get involved with this sort of thing, my main work is website design

Regards  Greg