James said:
I working on a Dell Dimemsion 8400. The motherboard developed a blown capacitor,
so We order a refurbished one from dell. The motherboard checks out fine. I thought
I had turned RAID-0 off so as to give my friend two h/d. I screwed up somewhere and
I'm not sure where. When the dell logo came up it hit ctrl -i to enter the raid bios
Next I thought i turned off raid. When I rebooted I was able to load xp/sp3 and i
update all the driver it was then that I noticed i only had one h/d in my computer.
I went to system properties and it showed 2 h/d and said they were working fine.
I rebooted and went back to raid bios and switched from one of the auto detch
to another and like a dumb a-- didn't write down what I changed. Now when I
reboot I can get to the normal bios but it says the h/d are controlled by the bios and
I have tried ctrl-i and it doesn't do anything. I know at this point I'll have to wipe
both drive. My friend doesn't want a raid system he just wants to have two separate h/d.
Help I screwed up and now I'm in over my head.
Thanks Jim
(e-mail address removed)
This is a pretty crummy manual, and I'm not sure it is showing
everything you can see or not.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim8400/SM/syssetup.htm
The BIOS consists of a number of code modules. Some code modules
are "add-on" type. They would be similar to a BIOS chip on a PCI
card.
Say, for example, you added a PCI disk controller to the computer.
One of those would have a BIOS chip soldered to the PCI card. The
code module in there is loaded during POST. For example, a RAID
setup screen might be in there. An "INT 0x19 capture" option in the
BIOS, may control whether add-on BIOS code modules get loaded at
POST or not.
Your BIOS, as listed in that manual, seems a bit different than the
average retail motherboard BIOS. It could be, that the "RAID Autodetect"
includes the loading of the RAID setup code. Maybe the "control-I" key sequence
will work, if the RAID Autodetect thing is enabled ? Otherwise, I don't
see anything on the above web page, which could have disabled the
control-I.
It is unclear from your posting, whether you've backed up your friend's
files or not. You should have done that first, before changing anything.
That would be a recommended procedure, because it might have allowed
you to back out and reverse what you're doing.
Let's make up an example. Say I had a computer with 2 x 80GB disks, and
they were in RAID 0 mode. RAID 0 is "striping", or an alternation of data
between the two drives. The end result, is a virtual device which can hold
up to 160GB of data.
To begin the transition to another operating mode for the disks, you
have to ask yourself, how much data will end up on the disks under the
new configuration. With two separate 80GB drives, it would be natural
to have two 80GB partitions. Now, maybe the original configuration had
used a 120GB partition out of the 160GB of room provided. It would be
a bit difficult to then reallocate that data, to the two 80GB partitions.
So before you begin, you have to study the partition scheme on the disks,
and if some of the user's data is to be preserved, figure out how you're
going to put that on the new configuration. You do that, before doing
anything destructive.
If you're simply trashing everything, and restoring from a Dell recovery
CD, then there is less thinking to do. You would enter the
Intel RAID BIOS setup screen (control-I perhaps), then do a "delete array"
in that screen. That would erase the RAID metadata which is written near the
end of each disk. After that, the two disks would be considered to be independent
of one another.
Then, you could use the Dell recovery CD, leave only one hard drive connected,
and do a restore. That should then put back the three partitions (or whatever
that Dell uses), and define whatever Dell considers the appropriate amount
of space for each. Then, you could shut down, and connect the second drive
again, go into Disk Management, and define the whole second drive as one partition.
Do a reboot. Did the setup survive ? Is all hint of RAID operation gone ?
Is the total number of partitions, from the two drives, correct ?
Then, you could return the computer to your friend.
Paul
