How to mix bootable NON-RAID HDD and data RAID on the same controller?

[kent_kurt]

Hi,

I have an old Asus Asus P5B-E Plus MB.
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=vh26TDbmym1cfFi7&templete=2

I believe that this MB has 2 RAID/SATA conrollers, the Intel P965 ICH8 Southbridge:
6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports Support RAID 0,1,5,10,
And a;
JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller
1 xUltraDMA 133/100/66/ for up to 2 PATA devices
2 xSATA (1 x internal, 1 x external)
Support RAID 0,1,JBOD

I have 2 identical HDD in a RAID 1 config that I use for storage, and a single HDD that i use for OS/Applications

About a year ago I had trouble when replacing a drive, and the only way to get WinXP installed again was to put the single OS disk on the JMicron instead. Now I have the OS disk on the JMicron and the RAID 1 data disks on the Intel controller.

I'm planning to install win7 this summer, and have a chance to set things right.
How should I configure the HDD's? Will the system be slower if the OS disk is on the JMicron in comparison to being on the Intel controller? Should they all be on the Intel controller, and if so, how do I make the OS boot from the single and not try to boot from the RAID drives (which it did last time I had to reinstall)

Cheers

 

[pbalstar]

You can keep all hdd's on the ich8 southbridge and still have some raid some not. When setting it up in bios you get the chance to set which drives are raid and which are not. Think about it... how would you be able to hook up optical drives to a raid 0'd machine? And I wouldnt even touch the Jmicron Controllers, its slower end of story.

 

[Emil3D]

On my mobo I have 6 plugs for SATA and currently I'm running 2 hard drives set as RAID 0 and two other normal hard drives. In the BIOS for configure SATA I set that to RAID and it works but I got all sorts of problems after I first tried to use the other hard drives as RAID and it turned out that my mobo can't support boot volume larger than 2 TB which made me split the new volume into two to make it bootable but then this screwed something in the BIOS and now I can't assign any of my RAID and non-raid volumes as bootable in the BIOS.
this thread here has full details of my problem
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258277-32-make-raid-bootable

 

[kent_kurt]

Hi pbalstar,
Thanks for your reply.
The issue is all about which disks are bootable and which are not.
I used to have 4 disks on the Intel controller, split into 2 RAID arrays. I removed one disk from the OS/boot RAID array, leaving me with one RAID array and a single disk. I then tried to reinstall Windows XP, but it wouldn't let me install the system on the single disk, it kept making the RAID array the bootable set. How can I make the single disk bootable instead? Moving the single disk to the Jmicron solved it, but I'd like to reinstall everything and have all disks on the Intel controller again.
Is it dependent on which SATA port they're connected to perhaps?
Cheers,

 

[Emil3D]

Hopefully there is more elegant way but If it was me, I would unplug the RAID and any other Hard Drives and leave only the one that you want to install the OS. Then the Installer will have no choice and install on that hard drive. After installation plug all other hard drives. When you start the computer with multiple bootable volumes it will start from the one set in the Boot tab of the BIOS. You can choose more than one bootable volume/devices and set the priority order there.

 

[kent_kurt]

Wouldn't unplugging the RAID drives completely mess up the array when I plug them in again?