Re: Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:37:44 -0400
Jeff wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Well... it appears that things are running normally again.
It's a long story; but, the biggest problem with the hard drive installation issue has to do with me not understanding that there are two RAID controllers on the Asus motherboard. When I read about the Promise controller when I first started through the manual, I "assumed" that was the only RAID controller, and that was the driver I attempted to install during the Win XP setup. That's why XP setup never recognized the array.
I now know that I can configure RAID volumes through either the Intel chipset, or the onboard Promise controller. I know which BIOS settings need to be changed and which drivers to install during the XP setup routine.
I do have a question about the drives, though...
I initially set up a pair of identical SATA HDDs as RAID0 with the Promise controller, and with the cabling correctly terminated. I thought I would experiment and verify that I could set the drives up as RAID0 using the Intel RAID controller. I changed the cabling, made changes to BIOS, made sure the RAID array was configured properly, and restarted the XP setup. Setup recognized the volume; however, when setup attempted to format the volume, it hung.... I had to do a hard restart to exit setup.
I ended up removing the drives from the system and moving them to another system where I made sure each HDD showed a single block of unallocated space. (On one of the hard drives there was a volume that had to be deleted. Why one and not the other?)
Other than not knowing what caused the original problem, I feel pretty comfortable with where things stand. I've learned a lot....
Thanks again.
Jeff
Generally speaking, the reserved sector on RAIDs, don't take the same
format. So you cannot expect to move a RAID0 from the Promise to the
Intel, and have it remain a RAID0. You'd need to use the Intel BIOS
or Intel RAID Management software, to put new reserved sectors (metadata)
on the drives.
You can move a Promise RAID0, from one Promise controller to another.
Apparently, there is some level of similarity between metadata, on
the Promise products.
Tomshardware did some compatibility testing, where they tried to move
hardware from one RAID solution to another. And that is the nature of
the results - some companies support some level of compatibility within
their own products, and even then, there are no guarantees. Something
you should learn from that, is that if your motherboard dies, your
RAID array may not be easy to move to another computer. Perhaps
a PCI RAID card, which can be unplugged from the motherboard,
makes more sense in that case. Or, making frequent backups
of the array on a single drive somewhere, so you can restore
to the array once it has been moved and prepared on another
computer. Either that, or be a wizard at data recovery :-)
What may have happened in your Intel case, is you didn't press F6
and install a RAID driver ? Maybe the WinXP installer was running,
using the default Microsoft driver or something.
Paul
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