SCSI RAID Problem

[garram]

I bought an adaptec 2100S SCSI RAID controller and 2 Maxtor Quantum Atlas 10K2 73.4 GB hard drives. I have been having trouble getting the drives to work. I tried contacting adaptec for support, but they will not provide support since the component was purchased OEM. Here are my system specs:

Motherboard: Intel D850EMVRL

SCSI Controller: Adaptec 2100s SCSI RAID controller

Hard Drives: 2 SCSI Maxtor Quantum Atlas 10K rpm, Ultrawide 160, 1.6 inch, 68 pin, 73.4 GB, 3HH hard drives

RAM: 512 Megs of PC1066 RDRAM

Processor: Pentium 4 2.53 GHz

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9700 pro 128 MB

The Problem:
When I first hooked everything up, the drives showed up in the SMOR utility and I was able to create a Raid (0, striping) configuration and everthing seemed ok. When I tried to format with NTFS using the Windows XP CD, I got "Error, could not format". I rebooted and opened the SMOR utility and one drive showed up as "Failed". I assumed I had a bad hard drive and had the drive replaced. I received a brand new hard drive and installed it in place of the failed one. This time, starting up one drive is recognized as Async Narrow, 3 MB/sec instead of Ultrawide 160 MB/sec (the drive that seemed fine before) and the new drive causes an alarm on the controller card and indicates that the drive is Ultra 160 and optimal, but shows up attached to a "Missing Component (0,1)". The drives are assigned IDs 2 and 3. I read through the support files on the adaptec, maxtor, and intel sites. On the adaptec sites, similar problems were reported with other hard drives (IBM drives) but not the ones I have. The response was to obtain firmware from IBM for these drives. I saw nothing like this on the Maxtor site.

I tried the suggestions they made such as moving the drives to the end of the cable just before the terminator, using a different PCI slot for the controller, enabling power termination on both drives, and I also tried changing SCSI id's on both hard drives. None of these worked. I upgraded the bios of the controller to v. 1.62 (January 2003). This didn't solve the problem either. I also updated the bios of my motherboard. I am out of ideas. Does anyone have any other ideas to try?

-Mat

[Force Flow]

Welcome to PCMech, garram!

The first thing to do would be to format both disks. Make sure they are both the same format!

Second, with your new drive, have you recreated the RAID array? If not, then that should be the second thing to do.

Third, when you begin to install XP, look for a part near the beginning for a line that says something like "Press F6 to install 3rd party SCSI/RAID drivers" It will be at the bottom of the screen. Press the function key it asks for. Next, insert the floppy driver disk. Once it installs the drivers, continue with the installation.

Hope this helps