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Old February 12th 05, 01:10 PM
Jeff French
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Kelvin,
I think I ran across what probably happened to your Raid array. Intel had
upgraded the 6300ESB driver so that it is compatible with both the ICH-5 and
ICH-6. In doing so, older arrays made with the older 6300ESB driver will not
work with the newer driver. Could that driver you installed from 'Gateway ?'
have been the upgraded version? I don't know if migrating back to the
original driver would have even been an option but I'm willing to bet you
got caught in the middle. You did the right thing by swinging your SATA
drives onto the Silicon Image controller. You can also run your ATAPI
CD/DVD-ROM drives from this controller if you use a Silicon Image chip based
IDE-SATA converter on the back of the CD/DVD-ROM.
To answer your question.....
Yes, you're right, you'll need a floppy disk with SCSI support drivers on
them for your SCSI CD-ROM. Visit Bootdisk.Com and download a good Win98
bootdisk, at the bottom of the website you'll find "Modify your custom
bootdisk to boot from a SCSI CD" follow that link to the next page and
follow the instructions to include the files within the 'scsiboot.exe' file
highlighted. I've been using these modified boot floppies for years. Perform
the F6 option while installing WinXP to load your SCSI controller drivers.
Make sure you have your SCSI devices configured properly before you start
and don't forget to check twice all the connections and terminator, this
particularly true for U320 SCSI.
My last PC had only SCSI devices and that is why I chose this motherboard to
migrate some of my SCSI devices (hard drives and tape backup). I've now got
about all my devices converted to SATA (hard drives, DVD-RW, and DVD-ROM).
My next project is using a Silicon Image 3124-2 PCI-X board to attach some
new faster SATA-300 hard drives. My other PCI-X slot is already filled with
a Firewire-800 card and prior to WinXP SP2 was really working at great
speeds. Thanks to WinXP SP2 the speed is about halved.
This board invites the owner to experiment with all the IDE, SATA, SCSI, and
Raid combinations. It's a shame there isn't better support from Gigabyte.

Have a Good Day!
Jeff

"Kelvin" wrote in message
...
thanks for ur help jeff. anyhow, here's my situation. i'm aware of those
steps. i did install windows xp successfully once. however, i recently
just bought a seagate 400gb drive, i have it hooked up to the hance rapids
controller (previously thought was the adaptec hostraid controller) and
windows install. once it's done installing it crashes after awhile. it
would continue to reboot until i shut the machine off. i found the
problem and apparently aarich.sys is the cause. anyhow, now i'm using the
sil 3114 controller and things are good again. anyway, thanks for the
info jeff. cleared up that little mishap. one more question, is it
possible to boot from a scsi cd-rom and install windows? or do i need to
get a dos bootdisk and install the u320 dos drivers?


"Jeff French" wrote in message
news:MldPd.64403$eT5.61183@attbi_s51...
Kelvin,
I kept scratching my head over this one. As I have stated, I'm not
familiar with this Raid (Hance Rapids - 6300ESB SATA Raid) because I
don't use it. I have my SATA DVDs connected to these connections and use
the Silicon Image Sil 3114 controller for my SATA hard drives.
On the motherboard CD in the BootDrv directory are all the floppy
installed drivers. Click on Menu.exe. This will bring up a 'Command
Prompt window' with a menu of all the drivers available. Place a
formatted floppy disk in your floppy drive, at the prompt, enter 'G'
(Hance Rapids Raid), and then 'return'. The Hance Rapids Raid drivers
will be loaded onto the floppy disk. When finished the Menu will return,
simply enter '0', the 'Command Prompt window' will disappear. Check your
floppy disk and you should find the following files and directory:

HRAIDSK1
TXTSETUP.OEM
WIN32 - DIRECTORY
AARICH.CAT
AARICH.SYS
ADHRAID.CAT
ADHRAID.INF
OEMSETUP.INF

'Enable' the 'SATA RAID Function' in the motherboard BIOS. Connect your
two SATA hard drives to the SATA0_SB and SATA1_SB connections, then
install WinXP. Use the F6 option early in the installation process and
place the floppy disk made above to load the Hance Rapids Raid drivers. I
think you know the rest of the process (about using 'Ctrl S' to bring up
the Adaptec SATA HostRaid Controller utility to configure your hard drive
array).

I hope you find this information useful.

Good Luck
Jeff