Hpt370/370a/372 Ata Raid Controller

[Treeman]

Howdy Folks,

After a clean of install of XP Pro w/ SP2 on a friends computer he ran some windows updates, and system restore quit working. I traced the anomoly down to a needed patch for the highpoint raid driver. So for this Soyo Fire Dragon motherboard I downloaded the update. Problem is they don't make the update self installing. I have included the readme.txt file for this update below.

From what I gather, you copy the files to a floppy, then disconnect the drives before updating.

I've never seen this type of install before. Is this the way you see the installation?

Thanks:

Readme file for HPT370/370A/372 ATA RAID Controller

BIOS, Device Drivers and RAID Management Software

Copyright © HighPoint Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Last updated on July 5, 2002

Please review this file for important information about compatibility issues and

differences in operation that were discovered after our product manuals were

created. In case of conflict among various parts of the documentation set, this

file contains the most current information.

Note: The latest firmware and product documentation will be available for

download at http://www.highpoint-tech.com

This file is divided into the following major sections:

1. Software Version

2. Files Listing

3. Revision History

4. BIOS Update

5. Known Problems

1. Software Version

====================

BIOS version: v2.32

Driver version: v2.32

ATA RAID Management Software version: v2.31

Operating Systems:

Windows 98/ME

Windows NT 4.0

Windows 2000

Windows XP

Version Compatibility:

Driver v2.32 can be used with GUI v2.1/v2.2 and BIOS v2.1/v2.2

if you do not use any of the following features:

1. Larger block size (above 64K)

2. Multi-controller support

Otherwise, you must use GUI v2.3 and BIOS v2.3 or later.

2. Files Listing

=================

Readme.txt This file

BIOS

|_ load.exe BIOS loading utility

\_ bios372.232 HPT370/370A/372 controller BIOS

Drivers Driver disk

|- win98_me Windows 98/ME driver

| |_ hpt3xx.inf

| |_ hpt3xx.mpd

| |_ hptpwr.vxd

| \_ hptwrap.vxd

|- win_nt Windows NT 4.0 driver

| |_ hpt3xx.inf

| |_ hpt3xx5.inf

| \_ hpt3xx.sys

|- win_2k Windows 2000 driver

| |_ hpt3xx.inf

| |_ hpt3xx.cat

| |_ hpt3xx.sys

| \_ hptpro.sys

|- win_xp Windows XP driver

| |_ hpt3xx.inf

| |_ hpt3xx.cat

| |_ hpt3xx.sys

| \_ hptpro.sys

|- disk1 Driver disk label

\_ txtsetup.oem Windows NT/2k/XP setup file

3. Revision History

====================

v2.32 07/01/2002

* Fix 48bit LBA formatting issue

* Fix hptpro.sys problem on Windows XP system restore and sparse files

* use PMM to allocate BIOS memory

* Disable BIOS EBDA reallocation by default

v2.31 01/09/2002

* Performance improved

* Fix BIOS compatibility issue with Adaptec SCSI

* Fix Seagate Barracuda III and IV mode to ATA100

* Show capacity by 1G=1,000,000,000 Bytes

* Fix BIOS bug "drive capacity incorrect after deleting a broken array"

v2.3 12/20/2001

* Add support for stripe size 128K-2M

* Support multi controller

* Modify driver for HPT370/370A compatibility

* Fix reading ATA/133 disk error when PCI clock is lower than 33MHz

* Fix compatibility problem with Intel IAA driver under Windows ME

* Fix BIOS compatibility issue with MSI845 mainboard

v2.2 12/08/2001

* Performance improved

* Fix GUI re-open bug when rebuilding an array

v2.1 11/15/2001

* Add 48bit LBA (Big Drive) support

* Fix BIOS display problem on S3 display adapter

* Fix BIOS BBS support

* Fix Windows ME hibernating problem

4. BIOS Update

===============

To update BIOS for onboard HPT370/370A/372 controller, please refer to your

mainboard manual or contact the hardware vendor for updating BIOS.

To update BIOS for HPT370/370A/372 adapter, you can use HighPoint BIOS loading

utility.

* Notes for BIOS update from v2.0.xxxx on adapters with auto-load enabled

If your HPT370/370A adapter has auto-load feature enabled, PCI configuration

header may change after you update BIOS. This will cause Windows 2000/XP

unable to boot from the controller. To avoid this problem, you must use load

utility v2.1.12.22 or later and specify the following parameters to update

BIOS:

load bios372.231 /e 408=1800003,42c=51103

5. Known Problems

==================

* Install OS to devices attached to HPT370/370A/372 controller

Before installing OS to devices attached to HPT370/370A/372 controller, you must

remove the drives connected to other controllers from your system temporarily.

After OS installation complete, you can put them back.

* Windows XP upgrade installation

When doing an upgrade installation of Windows XP with HPT370/370A/372 controller,

Windows XP will use HPT370 driver in its driver package and prevent user to

specify a new driver. To solve this problem you can do the upgrade as below:

1. Run XP upgrade program in a running system.

2. When setup finished copying files and ask reboot, DO NOT reboot.

3. Open WinXP temporary installation folder ($WIN_NT$.~BT) and search for

txtsetup.sif file.

4. Open txtsetup.sif with Notepad, remove the line "hpt3xx=hpt3xx.sys,4"

under section [scsi.load] by adding a semicolon before that line.

5. Save the file and reboot.

6. Start XP setup as normal. When setup prompt "Press F6 to add SCSI driver",

press F6 and specify the new driver to be loaded.

7. During text-mode setup, Windows XP may still copy the built-in HPT370 driver

to the final Windows installation's System32\Drivers directory. To use the

new driver, you must replace the old one before you continue into graphic-mode

setup. This can be done by booting from a DOS floppy if you are using FAT

or FAT32 file system; if you use NTFS file system, you have to use some

other method to replace the built-in driver.

There are more information about this issue on Microsoft support site:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;en-us;Q225125

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;en-us;Q220845

* Install HPT370/370A/372 controller on an existing Windows XP system

When installing HPT370/370A/372 controller on an existing Windows XP system,

Windows XP will try to install its HPT370 driver first; this may cause

system hang when you are using new features the driver don't support.

To avoid this problem, you shall update the driver first with no drives

attached to HPT370/370A/372 controller, shutdown the system, attach the

drives, then start the system again.

* Compatibility issue with Adaptec SCSI adapter

If you encounter compatibility problems when you use HPT3xx controller

together with Adaptec SCSI adapter, please try to disable EBDA reallocation

in Adaptec SCSI BIOS, or enable "EBDA reallocation" in HPT3xx BIOS.

You can use BIOS loading utility v2.2.07.01 or later to enable this

feature (e.g. "load /c bios372.232").

* Moving disks to other IDE controllers

When you want to use disks previously attached to HPT370/370A/372 controller on

other IDE controllers, please first delete any array information on the

disks. Otherwise your data may be lost when you want to put it back later.

* Rescanning disks

There is a limitation for the refresh function in RAID Management Software.

If you remove a disk from the controller but the software does not notice this

event, it is also unable to notice the event when you plug another disk back

to that location. You must force a refresh action before changing the disk.

* Problem on two disks with same signature under Windows 98/ME

If you break a RAID 1 array into two single disks without destroying data and

use both of them under Windows 98/ME, Windows will behave abnormally since

there are two volumes with same Windows signature. To solve the problem, boot

into MS-DOS mode and run "fdisk /mbr".

[Treeman]

Bump

Anybody?