SATA RAID Problems

[Citan]

My Brother just got a set of SATA HDD's to use in his PC and ran into several problems.

One is that the HDD's are not the same exact size and windows is only showing 30GB for a 30GB & 70GB HDD :confused:

second, if he plugs in any of his IDE HDD's Windows refuses to boot from the SATA drives. :confused:

Here's his PC Specs

Abit NF7 Mobo
AMD 3200+ (which refuses to run as a 3200+ only as a 2500+)
WD 74GB SATA
WD 32GB SATA
Maxtor 120GB IDE
WD 60GB IDE
LiteOn DVD-ROM LiteOn 8x DVD-RW
Gainward Geforce 6800 GT

there is another problem that his CPU will not run at all as a 3200+, we have tried everything including diffrent mobo's to get it to run faster than 2500+ with no luck.
If you set the mobo to 3200+ the system goes into an endless reboot loop. :confused:

Personaly I figure he got sent a bad CPU, but he never bothered to send it back & now it's to late to send it back. :rolleyes:

[Vertigo Acid]

Well, if you're running RAID-1 or RAID-0 on those two drives (you didn't specify!), and you are running dissimilar disks (which is not recommended!), you only get the capacity of the smallest drive. If you want to combine their capacity, you need to put them in a JBOD array. As for the booting from SATA with IDE drives, you need to check the boot order in BIOS, or possibly change what SATA/IDE combo mode you are running.
As for the cpu, there are lots of possibilities. My first thought is always power supply. But that question is not really suited for this sub-forum

[Citan]

Thanks, told him as much about the drive capacity, but he wouldnt listen before.
On the CPU problem he's Been through 3 PSU's, currently running a Thermaltake 450w, none of the other PSU's made any differance in that problem, hence why I fgure it's the CPU.

Moderator, Please move this back to General Hardware, I put it there in the first place as this covers more than just one specific problem, Thanks.