mobo problem

[evil clown]

my second rig is a 600 mhz p3 katmai on an msi 6168 mobo. it has built in 16mb voodoo 3 2000 video and onboard sound. ive recently got a problem because sometimes my mobo doesnt detect my harddisk or my harddisk gets detected but is of different make. i need to reboot before i can get my rig to operate normally. some of my friends say that my problem is the on board ide. its a slot 1 board and there are no slot 1 boards anymore except for those i820 based ones. i was thinking of puttin my harddisks on a raid/ata card. is it possible to boot from a raid card?

[MaxVal]

There are LOTS of slot 1 boards to be had, ranging from the 815 (preferred) chipset through the LX. Obsolete, but available!
Any add on controller card will be classified as a SCSI device by your BIOS. If the BIOS supports a SCSI boot option and you have a free PCI slot, it should work.
As for a RAID 0 setup, you will see little improvement with general usage. You need to be working with large files for a significant improvement to be noted.
I have a few systems of similar processor speeds that I use frequently, one has 2 7200RPM WD300BB's set for raid 0, the others have 7200RPM drives on a Promise U/66's. There is little difference of "feel" unless I am doing *.wav editing in Sound Forge. Even then, the difference when saving or loading a 50Mb file is only a second or two. Granted the time can add up, but I'd have to do a lot of editing!
Another RAID 0 negative is the fact that if either drive should fail, all data will be lost. A back up plan is imperative!
Bottom line...
You may well be better off without RAID striping. I would suggest a Promise U/66 card that can be had for less than $25 if you look carefully. If the U/100 is near that price, great! Just don't expect to notice any improvement with it.

MAX

[Axel]

Yes - in most cases, you can boot off a IDE/RAID card -

Question - putting a drive - only one drive - on a RAID card is a total waste - For RAID to work, you need a bare minimum of 2 physical drives - this will give you the option to mirror RAID1 - any higher RAID level and you will need a minimum of 3 physical hard drives to make it work......

Your limitation will come in the motherboard BIOS - is the RAID card compatible with the MB BIOS or not - should say it on the box or in the RAID documentation - that or it will indicate it doesn't rely on the MB bios at all and is independant -

RAID cards come with their own BIOS on the card - so the system should launch and either see one of the drives or all of the drives on the RAID card and allow you to boot from them. SCSI RAID cards have been doing this for years.

[evil clown]

thanks for the replies.

ill keep everything in mind!:)