ok so heres my situation. without going into frivalous detail me and my girl of 6 years just split and she took our pc with her. i have a dell poweredge 840 with 4 75 gig sas drives in it. i have win server 03,winxp pro, and/or vista home on disk for installation and the pc is running:

Phoenix ROM BIOS Plus version 1.10 A05
one 2.66 GHz fual core processor, processor BUS 1066 MHz,L2 cache 4MB

Broadcom NetXtreme Ethernet Boot Agent v.8.3.9

PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller BIOS
HA-0 (BUS 2 DEV14) PERC 5/i adapter
FW package: 5.2.1-0066

IPMI Server Management Configuration Utility 1.5

Baseboard Management Controller Revision 1.75
Primary Backplane Firmware Revision 1.05

Broadcom Basecode PXE-2.1 v1.0.4
Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v8.3.1

That being said, i can build a computer and all the inards and can do some seriious tweaking with any version of windows but dont have the first damn clue when it comes to bios settings and/or RAID setup.

I want to say screw a server and just somehow transform this hunk of components into a desktop pc. Is there anyone out there with the expertise and time to help me get back to SPJ?

(every single one of my posts for the last week including this one have been via my pro.)

I just want this server pc to be setup to where it's not really a server anymore but an overpowered desktop pc running all 4 or 5 hard drives as one (like a single c:\) if not even that then I would settle for them being independent from each other, but I just want to utilize all this hardware that's basically being waisted just sitting here not being used.

PLEASE HELP ME!!!!


Incase I wasn't clear enough, I need to know how to deal with the pickiest of settings for this type of crap:


http://www.ipmart-forum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=483868&stc=1&d=1238132664 http://www.ipmart-forum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=483869&stc=1&d=1238132664 http://www.ipmart-forum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=483870&stc=1&d=1238132664
http://www.ipmart-forum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=483871&stc=1&d=1238132664 http://www.ipmart-forum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=483872&stc=1&d=1238132664

first , the images are a bit small to read

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there should be an option to enable raid

once enabled you should get an option during boot [ press .....key for raid-setup ]
[see MoBo manual ]

in raid-menu you can build your array[s]

if the controller is not in windows , you also need the MoBo cd during windows install


tip ;
if you also have ide-disks , unplug them , windows wants to install there , instead of in raid-array