On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 06:57:19 -0400, George Macdonald wrote:

On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 23:32:13 -0400, keith wrote:

On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 18:38:05 -0400, George Macdonald wrote:

On Mon, 04 Oct 2004 21:52:42 -0400, keith wrote:

On Mon, 04 Oct 2004 04:15:11 -0400, George Macdonald wrote:

On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 19:56:42 -0400, Jim Lyons lyons432 wrote:

I'd like to replace my Abit BH6 with one of the now, relatively
inexpensive, Socket 478, 400 or 533MHZ FSB, P4 motherboards people
are currently selling new on Ebay for under $50. But I'd like to
continue using the two, 80 GIG, ATA, Maxtor HD's I'm currently running
(WIN 98) in a RAID 0 array on a Promise controller.

Am I reading this right? You're booting Win98 off a Raid-0 array? I
wasn't sure that was possible but... life in the err, fast lane?:-)

Why not, as long as the RAID controller has boot BIOS it should work. DOS
did.

Well with Win98 it's a certainty that something is going to go wrong at
some point, hardware quirks or no. If that something prevents the full &
correct switch from the RAID BIOS to the Promise protected mode driver...
boom goes a stripe array.

Booting from a striped arrray and having a stable Win9x system are not in
any way the same thing. As long as BIOS (on-board or in the I/O
channel) supports booting, any OS will boot. Once the OS takes over,
surrender all hope. ;-)

It's the bit in the middle that gets ya.:-)

The middle bit?? Promise raid controllers had boot BIOS. It's the end
bit that get's ya. Rather like my SATA drive under Linux. :-(

Yes, I did a lot of work with Promise "controllers" a *long* time ago.
They worked rather well even then for any OS I could throw at them. Of
course some didn't recognize anything other than the basic BIOS calls
(INT13H?).

Our hot-swappable drives with the Promise kit are still working very
nicely on the Win2K server. At 80GB they're now taking ~50mins to
re-build though - have to upgrade the mbrd.sigh

That seems long, but 80GB is a lot of "stuff". I been contemplating such
a setup for a while, but haven't had the energy.

IIRC none of the WinNT derivatives support booting off a RAID-0.

Sure they did! WinNT4 happily booted off a Promise controller in
RAID-0. I don't remember the specifics, other than that was one of my
compatability tests. I'm pretty sure they had full drivers available
too.

Funny it was in my head that they advised against that... or I read it
somewhere at Mickeysoft.mumblegrumble

Dunno why. I was setting up drives that way back in the '88 timeframe.
I did quite a bit of drive performance testing (using system benchmarks
and Intels drive metrics) back then, some using these sorts of cards as
experiments, and WinNT-4 was the platform of choice.

--
Keith