Can't set up my raid, second drive is hidden

[Detlef]

I have an abit KT7 Raid board with 2 40 gig Western digital caviar hard drives. After creating a raid of any kind my second drive disappears and shows as status mode hidden. Also the space on my first drive is only recogniced as a 10 gig, that is unless I partion it befor installing raid. What do I do wrong ? Or is there a problem with the western digital stuff ?
If you have any suggestions you can answer me here or e-mail me at Detlef1@hdvestmail.com Thanks:confused:

[Sterling_Aug]

I have a KT7A-RAID, so maybe I can help.

When I set up a RAID0 or a RAID1 system, everything worked correctly for me.

The second drive did show hidden when I setup RAID1. It should, you are using RAID1 mirroring which means both drives act as one drive, with all data being copied to the second drive. Since the data is copied twice (once to each drive) it is half the speed of a normal hard drive write, but by having the copy it is much better for data security and you should never lose data even if the mirror is broken and you replace the drive, the copy can be recreated.

RAID0 is called striping where both drives are added together and act as one BIG drive with double the space. A small pice of data is written to each drive at the same time, so the process is twice as fast. Since there is only one copy of the data, if a drive fails, the data is LOST.

[packetwar]

I believe it's just format command reporting the disk size wrong. Just do a raid 0, it will completely wipe both drives. I know the windows 2000/xp setup sees the drive for the full size, try using that instead of creating a partition with fdisk or whatever you were doing before.