JBOD setup ok for 1st time power up?

I am preparing to put a new rig together-XP2000, Epox 8k5a2, WD 80mb, cdrw, and dvd.

I am aware that it is possible to use the 2 raid ports on my motherboard to use as regular ide ports, as long as it is for Harddrives and not optical drives. At any rate, the WD drive will be in new status, and needs to be formatted. Will I be able to format it after booting up if it is plugged into one of the raid ports, or should I have this in IDE 1 first, format, and then go back and put in the raid spot? Thanks in advance!

Hi:

Why do you want to use the raid with just one HD? I would put the HD on ide 1 as master and the cdrw on ide 2 as master, dve on ide 2 as slave.

Gary

You can treat the RAID channels as regular IDE ports (except for no ATAPI support), so yes, you can partition/format them while your HDD is on a RAID channel.
Edit: Don't forget to specify in CMOS to boot from RAID.

I don't want to use one hard drive in a raid array -- I just want to be able to utilize one of the high point raid ide interfaces to allow for all three devices to be masters on their own channels

I know this can be done - but my question is whether or not I have to format the drive on a reg IDE port first, and move it over after XP is installed...

Thanks a lot orc- man, you have sure helped me a ton already! I feel more confident about putting this rig together! :)

No problem :) Good luck with the build!