After the physical installation, your hard disk drives will operate as two separated hard disk drives, so they need to be configured as a RAID system. The exact procedure and option names vary a little depending on the motherboard you have.

If you are using the hard disk ports controlled by the chipset, you must first enter the motherboard setup and configure them as “RAID” instead of “IDE.” Under “IDE” configuration, they work as normal IDE ports, while under “RAID” configuration you can enable them to work as a RAID system. In fact, if you don’t change this configuration, the system won’t show you the RAID configuration screen during the POST, thereby preventing you from setting up your RAID system.

Enter the motherboard setup (by pressing Del right after you turn on your PC), and change this option. On our motherboard, this option was available at Advanced, Drive Configuration, “Configure SATA As.” The exact path and option name vary depending on the motherboard manufacturer.

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Figure 7: Enabling the motherboard ports to work under RAID configuration

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Figure 8: Motherboard ports enabled to work under RAID configuration

After changing this configuration, you need to save the changes and exit.

RAID configuration is made by pressing a set of keys during the POST (Power-On Self Test), which is that series of text-mode messages that appear when you turn on your PC before it starts loading your operating system. This set of keys varies depending on the RAID chip manufacturer. Usually you press the Control key together with the first letter of the manufacturer's name; for example, Control I for intel, Control M for Marvell, Control S for SiliconImage, Control J for JMicron and so on.

This set of keys should be pressed while a RAID configuration screen is shown during POST. Since our motherboard has two RAID chips, two screens like this are shown, one for configuring the RAID provided by the Intel chipset and another for configuring the RAID provided by the Marvell 88SE6145 chip.

As we connected our two hard disk drives on the ports controlled by the chipset, the screen pictured in Figure 9 came up. As you can see, no RAID is configured. The phrase “None defined” appears under “RAID Volume,” and the two hard disk drives are identified as “Non-RAID Disk.” You need to press Control I while this screen is shown in order to configure your RAID system.

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Figure 9: RAID configuration screen during POST (Intel chipset)

This screen will be a little different depending on the RAID chip manufacturer. We installed our two hard disk drives on the ports controlled by the Marvell chip to show you another example (see Figure 10). As you can see, our RAID isn’t configured yet. The phrase “No array is defined!” under “Arrays Information” appears. Here you need to press Control M to configure your RAID system.

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Figure 10: RAID configuration screen during POST (Marvell chip)

Press the set of keys to enter the RAID configuration utility.