4 masters on abit kt7a raid?

[calljb1023]

I just bought an abit kt7a raid mobo & an AMD 1ghz 266fsb processor. I am going to put the components from my old system into this new setup. I have a CD-Rom, Burner and 2 hard drives. I have no intention of stripping the HD's...
I was, however, thinking of putting the hard drives on IDE3 and IDE4 (the raid controllers) and the CD-Rom and burner on IDE1 and IDE2. Thus, all IDE components would be masters with their own IDE connection.
So...will this work? I fear it might not because the HD's are on 3 and 4. In other words, the mobo might not be able to find the HD with the OS because it's looking at IDE1.
If anyone has some insight to this, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks,
Jeff

[PassnThru]

Shouldn't be a problem. I have the older KA7-100 and have done that before although I am not currently using the raid controller. You just need to enable the 'Future ATA IDE Controller' so it will see IDE3 and IDE4. Then set your BIOS to boot from the 'Future ATA' device. On boot up you will start getting a BIOS screen for the Highpoint controller also that will detect the drives hooked to it. I don't recall exactly how you set the primary boot drive from there but it was pretty self explanatory. One caveat - a friend and myself have found that when our hard drives are on the highpoint controller (on the KA7-100) that it benchmarks well but loading large programs (such as Unreal Tournament) takes 4 or 5 times as long as it does when hooked to the primary ATA controller.

[kandela]

No problems with what you are proposing
The hard disks can go on the highpoint controller as masters.
enable the ata100raid controller in bios
Set first boot device in the bios to be ata100 controller
when your system boots press ctrl H to enter
the raid bios and set one of the disks, it can be either as boot( providing it is already active as a bootable disk )
dont set any kind of raid
when you exit the system should boot up on your chosen disk.

as a note the raid on this board sucks.
I can get better benchmarks set how you are
asking with two independant ata100 drives than I can with raid 0
H.D. tach 2.61 26000 average with raid 0
38000 average as single disk

Shame because the rest is great.

[Kuasimodem]

Running the KT7-RAID with two 30Gb Western Digitals in DMA5. When I had this set as RAID 0 I was getting SANDRA benchs in the 4100 range.

Now that I have removed the RAID array and gone to dual boot, the drives bench at around 2600-2750. I found that by setting the swapfile to a fixed 512Mb and running SpeedDisk (Norton) I get better performance from the drives.

PS-The RAID controller makes a great dual boot controller. Just hit control H at the prompt during boot, and select which drive you want to boot from.