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timk9 · 03-17-2006, 09:58 PM

Hey folks. I'm looking for another Gigabyte user (or someone bored enough to research for me) with some advice about GigaRAID. I've seen similar threads in this forum but my case is slightly different.

I'm using a GA-8GPNXP_Duo motherboard with an onboard ITE IT8212 RAID controller ("GigaRAID"). I have two SATA drives I wish to use as standalone (non-RAID) drives on port 0 and 2 (BIOS treats it as IDE1 ? ); two optical drives as master/slave on IDE0, and two IDE hard drives I wish to use in a RAID-1 array. The IDE drives are both master, alone on IDE2 and IDE3. I have SATA RAID disabled in BIOS, GigaRAID enabled.

The SATA drives work just fine and I can boot with them. THE PROBLEM IS: I'm not having difficulty configuring the array. Simply, the GigaRAID configuration screen is no longer an option! After the initial POST screen, ITE BIOS should tell me to press Ctrl-G to enter RAID setup but this screen no longer shows up! There are no error messages in its place, it just continues to the next screen.

I've followed all the instructions in the manual, and this setup worked just fine last summer (I disassembled and haven't used the machine in 6 months or so). I've since tried disabling GigaRAID, I've tried enabling it as standard ATA non-RAID, and they just won't show up. I've tried resetting to defaults within BIOS, and tried clearing CMOS via the jumper. I've upgraded BIOS to F7. Windows recognizes the RAID controller but will not automatically install the driver. I manually install the driver, and RAIDmgr program runs but doesn't detect a controller. BIOS and OS recognizes both hard drives as standalone drives if I move them to IDE0. I've tried various combinations of SATA modes in BIOS.

Any help would be appreciated. Hopefully I'm missing something simple. I emailed Gigabyte and they want me to RMA the motherboard because of a possible bad onboard controller. But I don't want to send it in, and it worked fine last year. Is there some way the controller is disabled/enabled separately from the controller's own BIOS? Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
Tim

03-17-2006, 09:58 PM	#1 (permalink)
timk9 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Lockport, NY, USA Posts: 58 OS: XPPro, XPPro X64, 98, DOS, MacOSX, various Linuxes	Gigabyte GigaRAID setup (IT8212) Hey folks. I'm looking for another Gigabyte user (or someone bored enough to research for me) with some advice about GigaRAID. I've seen similar threads in this forum but my case is slightly different. I'm using a GA-8GPNXP_Duo motherboard with an onboard ITE IT8212 RAID controller ("GigaRAID"). I have two SATA drives I wish to use as standalone (non-RAID) drives on port 0 and 2 (BIOS treats it as IDE1 ? ); two optical drives as master/slave on IDE0, and two IDE hard drives I wish to use in a RAID-1 array. The IDE drives are both master, alone on IDE2 and IDE3. I have SATA RAID disabled in BIOS, GigaRAID enabled. The SATA drives work just fine and I can boot with them. THE PROBLEM IS: I'm not having difficulty configuring the array. Simply, the GigaRAID configuration screen is no longer an option! After the initial POST screen, ITE BIOS should tell me to press Ctrl-G to enter RAID setup but this screen no longer shows up! There are no error messages in its place, it just continues to the next screen. I've followed all the instructions in the manual, and this setup worked just fine last summer (I disassembled and haven't used the machine in 6 months or so). I've since tried disabling GigaRAID, I've tried enabling it as standard ATA non-RAID, and they just won't show up. I've tried resetting to defaults within BIOS, and tried clearing CMOS via the jumper. I've upgraded BIOS to F7. Windows recognizes the RAID controller but will not automatically install the driver. I manually install the driver, and RAIDmgr program runs but doesn't detect a controller. BIOS and OS recognizes both hard drives as standalone drives if I move them to IDE0. I've tried various combinations of SATA modes in BIOS. Any help would be appreciated. Hopefully I'm missing something simple. I emailed Gigabyte and they want me to RMA the motherboard because of a possible bad onboard controller. But I don't want to send it in, and it worked fine last year. Is there some way the controller is disabled/enabled separately from the controller's own BIOS? Any other suggestions? Thanks! Tim Last edited by timk9; 03-17-2006 at 10:00 PM.