Adaptec ATA2400a RAID Controller

[dannyboy14]

I recently purchased an Adaptec ATA 2400a RAID controller with 3 Maxtor 6L040j2 40Gig drives to establish a RAID-5 configuration on a file server.

Here's my problem. I do not yet have an O/S on the system. I installed the controller, all LED's on the controller signal as if the controller is fine. All HDD's are set to master and I have one drive per channel. All adaptec BIOS updates have been installed, the drives zapped. The problem is, during bootup, the motherboard BIOS recognises the adaptec controller and the first (0) ATA channel. However, the other channels (1 and 2)are not recognised.

When I attempt to configure the HDD,s in the SMOR utility, SMOR recognises Bus 0 and Bus 1. Within bus 0, HDD 0 is also recognised. However HDD 1 on Bus 1 is not. So i removed the controller, and performed scans of all drives with their coresponing cables with the Maxtor PowerMax utility. All drives came up clean and a low-level format of all drives was performed. Once I installed the contoller and the HDD's, i was back to square-1.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions that might help out? I would most certainly appreciate the help. My hairline would be thanking you.

 

[compy]

just a guess, maybe they aren't compatible? probaly way off though, maybe you have to have the os installed, but i doubt it...

 

[dannyboy14]

the maxtor drives are ata-100, technically they should be compatible. I haven't seen any information that states otherwise. I tried installing OpenBSD, however there were issues that because the the RAID was not properly configured. But I can't configure RAID if it doesn't recognise HDD1 and HDD2.

Thanks though.