cannot enter hpt372 raid bios

[Porosus]

I recently bought a Soyo Dragon KT400 Dragon Ultra Motherboard for a computer I'm assembling. I plan to have two Western Digital 80GB drives connected in a Raid 0 array using the onboard Highpoint hpt372 controller.

When I first put the computer together I had no trobule creating the array and soon had Windows XP up and running. A few hours later, I shut down the system to fix an internal USB cable that wasn't properly connected. When I powered back up, the raid array was gone and the computer hung after the raid controller had found the two separate harddrives. I unsuccessfully tried typing CTRL-H to enter the bios. Soyo's support never got back to me (though an automated email said I should hear from them in two days). That was two weeks ago.

I exchanged the motherboard thinking it was defective. When I reassembled everything, I encountered the same problem, before I changed any system bios settings. It just hangs after identifying the drives. If I remove the drives from IDE3 and 4, I'm able to enter the raid bios. Also I've connected the drives to IDE1 and 2, created new partitions, and formatted them. When I reattach them to IDE 3 and 4, I still have the same problem. As far as I can tell the raid controller is OK and the drives are functional and no longer contain traces of the old array, which I thought may have been responsible for the problem. Any advice or observations would be greatly appreciated as I've already spent several frustrating hours on this problem and am at my wits end.

[no1_vern]

Hi Porosus,

Welcome to Techimo.

For motherboards with Highpoint controller.
1. boot in to BIOS by pressing Delete at startup.
2. go to SOYO Combo Feature, and Enable Onboard IDE RAID, then Save and Exit from BIOS.
3. boot to windows and after windows prompts, that it has found a new device, install "High Point 372" drivers in SOYO CD. this folder can be located on the SOYO CD in \Raid\HPT372.

From http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=116


Question, Why put the drives on IDE 3&4? If the array works on 1 & 2 why not keep it there?

[Porosus]

no1_vern,
Thanks for your response. Raid is enabled in the system Bios and IDE 3 and 4 are the only two connectors for the raid controller. The problem is that I'm planning on installing the operating system on the raid array. The system hangs while scanning the raid devices and never reaches the boot stage. So even if windows was in place, I would be unable to reach it to install drivers.

Unfortunately, the knowledge base article you linked to deals with using IDE 3 and 4 as normal controllers rather than parts of a raid array. I've scoured Soyo's site and spent over an hour searching the web for reports of (and fixes to) similar problems without success.

My best guess is that some residual information, that isn't removed during a format, remains on each drive from the previous array and is causing the controller to lock up after scanning the connected drives. I'm not sure how technically plausible this scenario is, but I can't think of other possibilities which would account for the same behavior on two motherboards persisting after the drives had been formatted.

[Porosus]

I finally resolved the problem! The raid controller started working again after I upgraded the system bios. Since the previous motherboard had worked with the old bios, I think that writing 0s on both hard drives using a Western Digital application also helped. I'm just happy it's up and running. Thank you for your time and suggestions no1_vern.