Bit of a long delay - "Press F10 to enter RAID Setup"

[DragonQ0105]

Motherboard: Gigabyte K8N Ultra-9.
HDD: Maxtor SATA 160GB

I just built a PC for a relative - took me ages to install XP to the SATA Drive. To get the drivers, I needed to make a Windows 98 SE Startup Floppy with CD-ROM Support! (Booting from 98 CD into DOS resulted in no CD-ROM Drive, and using the Motherboard's CD to boot resulted in the Floppy being moved to drive "B:", so the copy process wouldn't work).

Anyhoo, every time it starts, it does the quick check thing for the CPU, RAM and Drives, then it sits there for about 10 seconds with a message "Press F10 to enter RAID Setup". This seems a bit too long to me - even if it is normal. I THINK I had to enable RAID for the HDD to make it boot from it, even though when I enter this RAID Menu, it shows no disks. If I remember rightly, if I turn off RAID for this Drive's Channel, then it fails to recognise it and therefore won't boot.

How do I make this message go away or show up for less time?

 

[bcastner]

Reinstall it properly.
During the setup process, very early on, you will see the prompt to hit F6 to install Raid or SCSI drivers. (You are not given much time to respond). The only place these can be is on a floppy disk at this setup stage.

The drivers can be in-line added if a format is not required. For this see:

http://www.msfn.org/unattended/xp/gettingstarted.htm

or if you would like to use the preinstallation environment, see :

http://www.windowsubcd.com/index.htm

 

[DragonQ0105]

I did install it correctly. I had some trouble getting the drivers from the provided CD-ROM to the floppy, but I did it in the end. I installed XP using F6 to install the SATA Drivers. The system works fine, I just don't understand why the bootup needs to be delayed by 10 seconds asking me something which I cannot do anything with anyway (as there are no Disks shown in the menu if I press F10).

 

[bcastner]

You may not have satisfied the BIOS of the RAID controller itself.

This sounds like the source of the issue is from the controller, and not BIOS or the OS.

If you hit F10, is there a configuration option, and a way to preserve in CMOS the settings?

 

[DragonQ0105]

If I hit F10, I just get a list of things to do such as "Create RAID Array", "Edit RAID Array" etc., but no disks are listed so none of the options work. Maybe I could try disabling RAID, but then the drive may not boot again. I guess it's worth a try. I can't remember exactly what settings I needed to do to get it to work (I don't have the PC in front of me right now).

 

[Sympology]

The reason the raid takes so long is that it looks for multiple drives and spins them up one at a time. SCSI cards did a similar thing.
If your not using raid you should be able to disable it in the BIOS.
Feel lucky, some servers I use can take a minute for the RAID controller to spin up.



Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[ceh4702]

Maybe you can turn the raid array off with a jumper or something.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.