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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (911)	5/31/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

IDE RAID Promise Fast Track..Dual Boot More from DRWHOM on Tom's Hardware Guide Forum tomshardware.com From: the dr (DRWHOM) To: Zeuspaul (ZEUSPAUL) UNREAD 8 of 8 Posted: 5/31/98 4:18:00 PM In my system the motherboard bios boot options allows me to control whether any drives attached to the on board controllers will boot or whether the selected boot drive on the promise card will be the boot drive. I do this by going into the motherboard bios setup during bootup and either enabling or disabling the on board controllers as bootable. If I disable them then any drives on the Promise card become bootable. If I enable them then any drives on the onboard controller will boot. Disabling these controllers in the boot options menu on the motherboard bios setup does not prevent them from later functioning fully after windows loads. One of the optional ways of configuring your fours drives under the Promise Fasttrak card is to have the card configure them as a single continuous "C" drive. In order for this to work you must have fat 32 enabled on your system. In my case this allows me to have 4 quantum 6.4's become a single "C" drive of approx. 25.2 gigs. In this configuration the card fills up each drive completely with data before it writes to the next. The upside is that if one of the drives fail only the data on that drive is compromised. The down side is that because each drive is running separately, there is no performance improvement. Additionally under this configuration you must repartition and reformat the setup after you create it in the fasttrak bios. This ofcourse means you lose any data or programs you have on the drives. Another way to configure all four drives as a single drive is to configure them as a stripe. In this mode the card splits all writes onto the drives into blocks or stripes writing first to one drive then the next, the next and finally the last. All four drives then read and write blocks of the same file or program virtually simultaneously. This is supposed to offer the most continuous throughput for large audio or video files. In normal business and gaming applications I have found very little significant improvement configured this way. The downside of this configuration is that if one of the drives should fail then all your data and programs will be compromised since they are striped in blocks across all four drives. Additionally, you must repartition and reformat the mirrored array after it is created in the fasttrak bios setup before it will function. Also you must have fat 32 for this to work properly.

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (911)	6/3/1998 10:18:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Promise Fasttrack IDE RAID....more from DRWHOM from Tom's forum tomshardware.com My question Within the Promise BIOS do you have options to select different hard discs as the boot disc? For example could you have one operating system on a particular disc and select it as a boot disc. Could you then on a subsequent boot go into the Promise BIOS and select another disc with a different operating system and boot from that second disc? _____________________________________________________________________ From:the dr (DRWHOM) To:Zeuspaul (ZEUSPAUL) Posted: 6/3/98 8:00:00 PM The answer is yes, exactly! In the fasttrak bios setup you can assign which drive is the boot drive amongst the drives attached to the card. For this to work the drive in question must have been partitioned as a primary dos partition when it was partitioned. For example I will explain how I have my four quantum 6.4's setup now. In the bios I have each drive configured as a single stripe of only one disk. The effect of this configuration is to have each drive treated as an array of only one drive. When my system boots the bios shows that there are 4 functioning raid arrays listed as array1, array2, array3 and array4. If I go into the bios setup, one of the menu options will show these arrays and indicate which disk belongs to each and also which controller channel it is attached to. One of the other menu options allows me to change the array configuration settings. It is here that I can change which array(ie. disc) is the boot array. One of the other menu options allows me to take an existing drive with data on it and mirror(copy) it exactly onto one of the other attached drives. Whenever I want to try something wild in the software or hardware settings I will mirror the C drive and then go into the bios setup and make that new mirrored copy drive the boot drive. As soon as I reboot the computer, it is running off that other drive although the system now calls "it" the C drive. If I royally screw everything up on that drive then I simply reboot, go into the fasttrak bios setup and reassign the original drive back as the C drive again and I'm right back to normal. The nice thing about this procedure is that the card does these mirrors so quickly. It can completely copy(mirror) a C drive of 3 gigs to a second drive in about 15 minutes and the copy is perfect in all respects. So yes, although I have never done it myself I am sure you could partition, format and install say windows95 on one drive and NT on another drive and some other kind of OS on a third drive and simply switch which drive is the boot drive from one to the other by going into the bios setup without ever opening the case and touching the hardware! I hope this answers your question. As you may have guessed I have had a lot of fun doing this kind of juggling with the card. the dr

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (911)	6/4/1998 11:27:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Respond to of 14778

IDE RAID ..Promise FastTrack...Drive Letter Assignments..DRWHOM From Tom's forum tomshardware.com My question Given four drives in a four array configuration. Can one alter the sequence of the arrays as reported to the OS? I would like to be able to affect the drive letter assignment. If the first array is the boot drive it will be C. I assume array 2,3 and 4 are D:, E:, and F: respectively. If one mirrors to E: and then sets "E:" as the boot drive it becomes C:. The question is what drive letter sequence do the other drives assume and can it be changed by altering the array design. _____________________________________________________________________ From: the dr (DRWHOM) To:Zeuspaul (ZEUSPAUL) Posted:6/4/98 7:24:00 PM I am not exactly sure how that works. My recollection is that the card assigns drive letters to disks and arrays based on which channel the drives are attached to and whether the drive is the master or slave on that channel. My four Quantums show up as c,d,e,and f normally as follows: the master drive on the primary channel is c drive as long as it is selected as the boot drive; the slave on the primary channel is the d drive; the master on the secondary channel is the e drive and the slave on the secondary channel is the e drive. If for instance I mirror the c drive onto the e drive (ie. master primary to master secondary) and then go into the bios and set e as the boot drive, then the following happens: e becomes c, c becomes d, d becomes e and f remains f. Anyway that's what I think happens. This is inconvenient to the extent that shortcuts to files on some of the drives no longer work. I don't believe you can directly assign drive letters to overcome this automatic action of the card. This becomes even more complicated if you have additional partitions on some of the drives. the dr