ADAPTEC AIC-7986

[blst]

(sorry for the crosspost, but it's sort of an emergency)

hello,

i am fairly novice when it comes to hardware and especially RAID arrays, but i need to set up what i think is a basic scenario.

i have an older machine with an intel board.

i have 2 drives which i would like to act like one drive. i think the set would be a RAID 1, but i am open to suggestions.

this machine was configured before and now when i try to install a new version of windows, at the set up step it shows to drives rather than one.

i have deleted both partitions and tried again, but it wants to create 2 different drive letters rather than just C.

is there some sort of hardware setting i could use to accomplish this?

could anyone help me with this? is there an array config tool that can set this up?

thanks...

[ripken204]

so you want raid1? thats for backup purposes, do u know of the different type of raids and what they are?

anyways... once you set up raid1, boot the server2003 disk and when it asks to select the hdd, make sure that only 1 shows up. i think you can add partition here, otherwise you can just to it in windows or thru a partion manager once windows is installed.

[blst]

you know, i really don't completely understand the differences, but it seems like raid 1 is the one that is needed.

where basically the second drive is a copy in case the other drive goes down.

the part i am unsure of is how to set this up so than when i install windows, only one drive shows up.

there is some info in the win 2003 server help that talks about creating mirrors but the options are not there when i right-click on the disks in disk management.

i would rather do this at a hardware level, which appears to be my only option.

thanks...

[ripken204]

we raid1 is ur way to go then, thats exactly what it is. doing this has nothing to do with windows, its all hardware.

hmm.. i cant seem to find ur raid controller here

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/raid/

are you sure that the model number?

but i would take a look at this if i were you, its not ur model but its something

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/installat...ation_guide.pdf

[blst]

the model number is aic-7896 as far as i can tell. it's stamped on the chip and it shows as the system boots.

i will look at this pdf and let you know the outcome.

i appreciate your help and i hope this works.

thanks.

[allen2]

As i already replied in the other post: You scsi controler doesn't seem to have builtin raid if this is your motherboard.

Did you checked the manual ?

Did you tried to use ezscsi from adaptec ?

[blst]

thanks, i think the solution to this problem is there is no solution.

i have no drivers and there don't seem to be any readily available so this will be a standard set up with 2 drives and i can mirror the critical data to the other but no raid.

i can live with that as this machine is about 7 years old or so.

thanks for everyone's help.