I'm new to this Raid stuff and would like to ask a few questions that maybe you all can help out on. I just got a TH7 Raid board and would like to run either Raid 0 or 0+1 with Windows 2000.

Here are my Questions:

1. Can the drives be partitioned? On my single 60 gig hd, I used to partition it into a 10 gig Cdrive and 50 gig Ddrive (I put Win2k on C: and all my junk that I want to keep on D:, that way I could do clean OS installs on C: and retain all my stuff on D . I will be running 2 60 gig drives for the Raid. Can I have the raid act the same as the single 2 partition drive? (I guess the end result I'm looking for here is a Raid setup partitioned into a C: and D

2. Do I have to install Windows 2000 first, then setup the Raid or can I setup Raid first, then install Windows 2000?

3. Any recommendations on Raid 0 vs. Raid 0+1.

The Raid striping is done during the Power on self test.
You will have to stripe the whole drive as one drive. BUT, Then with F-Disk, or partition magic you can make as many little drives you want.
Keep in mind though, If you change anything on the raid stripe - Like the Stripe type 0,0+1,1 then you will loose all information on all drives.

You stripe 1st then install windows. that is by far the easiest I have found.

here is how I have it setup

IDE1 Master(cd burner) Slave(DVD)
IDE2 Master(Zip)
IDE3 60 gig Western Digital/100
IDE4 60 gig Western Digital/100

I'd add though, that if you have a spare HD, install that with your OS first. After your system is configured correctly, disconnedt that drive and hook up your to be RAID drives.

HLE, then reboot with a boot disk. Are you determined to use NTFS? If not, use W98 boot disk, boot to dos, run fdisk, which will find your raid drive, and likely report its size incorrectly, don't worry, just use the largest size... (my suggestion only).

Once partition is setup, get out of fdisk, reboot again with same boot disk, to dos, and format that drive... with two 60 gig RAID 0, go take a nap....

ONce format is done, power down, hook up the OS hard drive to IDE 1 or 2, and boot with Ghost (norton) and mirror over to your RAID.

Once done power down, disconnect the non-RAID OS HD, and power up and your system will boot with the RAID drive, and XP will use a default (non-RAId) driver. Once in XP, install the ABIT RAID driver, reboot and you are done.

Reason I added the in-between:

XP has a bug in it that it will re-assign/re-letter hardware on the fly, without notifying you. The paper about this is on the MS site.

For example: I had a RAID 0 setup (two 30 gig IBM Deskstars) on primary RAID 3 and 4.

Put a slave on three and or 4, or primary/slave on 1/2, and ghosted for a backup of the RAID.

Well, spontaneously and at unknown times XP PRO would see that the slaves or non-RAID primaries had a bootable OS on them, and even though the RAID was set as the boot drive, XP would boot from a slave drive or other primary!

Once this happened the RAID boot sector would become corrupted and I could no longer boot from my RAID, even though I could boot from the new drive XP had selected as a boot drive, and see the files on the RAID drive!

The only fix I found was:

1. Disconnect all non-RAID slaves/primaries on 1-4

2. Re-fdisk the RAID

3. Re-format the RAID

4. Reconnect a (once slave with the backup OS) drive anywhere.

5. Boot to Ghost and mirror back to RAID drive.

6. Disconnect the backup drive.

7. Then I can boot to RAID with no concerns.

Additional notes: As long as I have any other drives on the IDE's, any one them with a bootable OS, other than the RAID, XP will sometimes reassign the boot drive/re-letter the boot drive, starting the problem all over.

As long as I have a master/slave with no bootable OS, I can use that drive for anything I want and no problems. Very weird. Wish MS would fix that bug.

Hope this helps,

Very 1st Step, while booting, Press CTRL-H to get into the Highpoint Raid setup utility, create a stripe. ( I reccomend taking 2 drives and set them as master/single, ( since you use WD drives, set them for single, master will screw things up). Place them on as IDE 3 and IDE 4 Master slot, NO SLAVES attached to the IDE 3 or 4 cables. The reason for this is for throughput. If you only have 1 drive per port, then each drive gets to use the whole bandwidth of the HD controller chip, rather than sharing with a Mas/Sla configuration.

1) Boot off a Partition Magic - boot disk( if you have it, if not you should !)
Partition and format the Drives Primary not Logical and set one of them as active, choose Fat32.
( fat32 can give you less headaches in the long run; especially if you corrupt Windows and need to get data off of the drives).
2) Boot off the Win98 boot disk - type sys c: {PRESS ENTER KEY}
Note: This will make the c-drive a bootable partition.
3) Turn off UDMA Enable/Disable in Bios, this will prevent the UDMA/WindowsSetup/Abit-Bug from popping up. IE; you can complete Win2k/XP setup without BlueScreens or Lockups.
4) Install Win2K/XP
a) Win2k - Press F6 while Win2k 1st boots and this will let you load a HPT Raid driver during setup. Do NOT use the driver from your disk which came from Abit in the box !I use the v1.6.012 driver myself, other use the 103b and sti;; other use the v2.0 driver in bot Win2K and WinXP.
b) WinXP - your choice, either press F6 as above or use the built in driver for WinXP to run the HPT controller during setup.
Note: XP has a built in driver, whereas Win2k does not.
5) After Windows completes, load the Intel driver "Chipset INF and ATA100" or "Chipset INF and App Accelerator". Both Application Accelerator and ATA100 do not need to be loaded concurrently, use one or the other.
6) Install Raid drivers
7) Re-Enable UDMA modes in Bios, Reboot and all is well, or should be.

The reason you use Partition Magic is because it is very fast, If you need to experiment and reinstall windows 3-8 times in a day, then you will appreciate this tool. Formatting the 2-60gig HD's you have would take over and hour and this is one step you do not want to repeat many times.
Also try to use Powerquest's-Drive Image or Norton's-Ghost and make partition images along the way, you wont regret using these tools once you've mastered how to use them efficiently.

Once I got the new board (TH7-II) I used the CTL-H to enter the Highpoint BIOS and setup 2 WD 20G hard drives on IDE3 and IDE4.

The jumpers on the drive had to be set as CS in order for the drives to be recognized at all in this configuration. I set mine for mode 0 Striping.

I was told it was better to have the drives on separate IDE ports rather than run them master slave on the same port by ABIT support.

Then I started the WinXP installation using all default WinXP drivers and installation completed no probs.

Here are a few of the thing I tried to trouble shoot the problem.
1. Installed WinXP on both WD disks on IDE1 with no problems. (So the the WD disks are okay). ALso used the same cables so they were okay too.
2. Abit had me try to install WinXP in regular IDE but of\n IDE3. (don't set up anything as raID. ABIT said you can use IDE3 and 4 as regular non-raid ports. This failed thus leading us to bad motherboard hardware.