[pacerbfl]

--- I have put two 160GB drives in a RAID array. These are recognized as functional. Bios changes were made so that the master drive in the array is the boot drive. This drive was originally my bootable drive.
--- I get the message "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"
bfl

[Advertisements]

when you set up the RAID, did it give you a warning that it would erase all data on the discs? some RAID arrays do this on initial set up. also, did you set up as RAID 0 or RAID 1? also please specify is these are SATA, IDE, or SCSI drives.

[audioboy]

when you set up the RAID, did it give you a warning that it would erase all data on the discs? some RAID arrays do this on initial set up. also, did you set up as RAID 0 or RAID 1? also please specify is these are SATA, IDE, or SCSI drives.

[pacerbfl]

mobo is Asus A8V SE Deluxe with AMD 64 3000+ cpu.
Hard drives are WD 160GB IDE
RAID 1 for mirroring was set up.
Setup procedure copied existing drive to second drive.
Primary RAID drive selected as first boot drive.
Initial part of boot procedure acknowledges the presence of all drives and indicates that RAID array is "functional"

[audioboy]

my guess is its seeing the RAID as 1 drive now, but I'm not sure. hopefully there will be something in your manual about how to set it to pick a drive to boot to.
I didnt see an A8v se deluxe on the asus site, only an a8v deluxe, or a K8V se deluxe.

[pacerbfl]

--- You are correct. It is an Asus K8V SE Deluxe mobo. Pardon my typo.
--- No instruction in the manual for choosing a boot drive.
--- The primary drive in my RAID array had been my boot drive prior to setting up RAID. It was working just fine. It has several partitions. According to the manual, the Promise FastTrak program copies this drive to the second drive in the array. That process was acknowledged as completed.
--- I suspect that the choice of a boot drive may come up if I were installing two new drives.

[audioboy]

I think you are right, this may only work when setting up the raid with 2 new drives. so, perhaps wont be able to make this work now. you should be able to undo the raid1 array, and have it retain all data on the first drive. check the documentation on that.
you could also just remove the second drive, and the raid tool will say you have a broken array. again, you should be able to tell it to stop the mirroring, and continue on with the drive intact. this may cause problems for getting any data off the second drive, if you have any there.

I would think you should be OK to use the 2 drives as separate, and if you are really concerned about data loss, do a weekly backup of critical data to the second drive. this will also give you more storage overall.
sorry I dont know a definite answer here, I havent used the SATA raids personally yet.