Gary,
Thanks for the reply. I have now set up the machine in a RAID 1 config. Security is what I want. Navigating the control panel/admin tools/comp management/disk management reveals that the system does indeed 'see' the HDDs as one (disk 0/ basic).
I have partitioned it 30g/50g NTFS. Right clicking on the disk properties reveals that the systems recognises that is is a mirror array:-
"Promise 1x2 Mirror/RAID1 SCSI Disk Device".
The 2 HDDs (Maxtor 80GB, 8mb buffer) are plugged into the dedicated raid channnels on the mobo, controlled by the on board Promise 20276 chip. The OS is obviously installed on the array and on the face of it I'm ready to go. (At this stage just the raw os is installed. But....
What I really wanted to achieve when I purchased all the parts for the machine, was to put together a system that allowed me to have the OS on its own HDD and use the other 2 in raid 1 purely for data etc. i.e. run the OS HDD in the primary IDE channel and the raid hdds in their dedicated raid channels.
I guess I am asking it to do something it is not designed to do. Certainly Gigabyte state that such a set up has not been tested/ is not supported/ will not work etc.
However... apparently it is possible to make it work either like this or in another manner that DOES involve 3 HDDs. The promise 20276 chip is the same as that on some of their stand alone cards where just this type of set up is possible and my curiosity makes me determined to suss out a way of doing it. A clue may be the Mobos raid BIOS being the Promise MBFastTrak133 'Lite' version. Perhaps flashing on the full version of this (dangerous?) is the key.....?
B_L
BTW I have tried booting up with a 3rd drive (another Max 80gb with XP on it). If I do this and go to disk management the system sees all 3 drives but the array is not recognised as such by windows even though during the boot up the array is quoted as 'functional'.