adding HDD question

[187]

hi, i have an epox 4g4a+ mobo with two 80gig hdds on the ide controller right now. i have 2 optical drives (one cdburner, one dvd player).

i have only a few gigs of hdd space left and i want to add additional hdds but there are no more ide spaces left (they are taken up by the 2 hdds and 2 optical drives). how would i add an additional 160gig drive?

this motherboard has a raid controller although i dont know much about that. im not really intrested in using raid, i just want my 2 80gigs plus an additional hdd in there. how would i go about adding that?

thanks for answering my noob question.

 

[mrweirdo]

I'm not sure about your board but I have seen motherboards that you can disable the Raid on the second interface through the bios. If i recall in Award bios its under advanced setup or something of the sorts were there is an option that you can chose RAID and what type of RAID or BASE wich will allow you to use a hd normaly. You might want to have a look at your motherbords documentation or visit your motherboard manufactures website.

 

[187]

so are you saying there could be a way to disable the raid controller and use those connections like a normal ide drive setup?

how do you guys go about getting those extra drives in your system?

 

[EeyoreX]

More likely than not the setup will be easy. It should be:

1) Install the RAID controller drivers in Windows. (Windows may have already installed the default drivers, so this step may be unneeded. See if there is a RAID /SCSI/Other controller installed in the Device Manager.)
2) Reboot and install drive.
3) Start computer.

Windows should now find the new drive and allow you to partition and format it.

Let us know how it goes, it should really be that easy though. As a side note, many of these controllers do not support ATAPI drives (like CD-ROMS etc) so I would only attach a hard drive.

\Dan

 

[187]

eeyore,

so i can simply connect a single hard drive to the RAID controller and it will perform like normal?

is it that simple? i dont have a spare hdd at the moment, i was hesitating until i figured out what it would require.

but if it is that simple, it should be great.

thanks for the response!

 

[EeyoreX]

That should be it, assuming you have drivers installed for the controller. But that is also easy to take care of if it's not done alreay.

\Dan

 

[187]

thanks for the help.

 

[EeyoreX]

No problem, let us know if there is any trouble.

\Dan

 

[Jeff H]

187, your 4G4a+ has a HighPoint 372 controller on it. It will function as a single disc controller just fine. However, keep in mind that it will only work w/ hard drives. It doesn't have the capability to control optical drives.

FWIW I'm running a 4PDA2+ board w/the same 372 controller on it. I have a single Samsung 160GB 8MB cache PATA drive connected, running as my boot drive. I have an IDE DVD drive on one IDE channel and an IDE CD-RW drive on the secondary channel, each as a master.

I'll assume you're running WinXP. First go into the BIOS and make sure the HighPoint Device is enabled, under Integrated Peripherals. Reboot into your OS and do the driver install (you should have a floppy or CD w/ the HighPoint drivers on it). You do not need to do the HPT RAID software install, just the basic driver install.

After you install the driver shut down your system and connect your new drive. Go back into the BIOS and make sure the boot order (Advanced BIOS Features/Boot Seq & Floppy Setup) specifies your HDD0 as the first boot device. Also make sure your RAID & SCSI Boot Order show HighPoint first and SCSI second.

Once you're in to your OS you can go in to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage and set up the drive (partition and format).