Bios settings for Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 to setup RAID

ksrossmoor

Honorable
Mar 20, 2013
9
0
10,510
Hello,

To get things started, here's what I have:
Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 - BIOS Ver. 1503 x64
AMD FX8350
4X8 Crucial Ballistix 1600
4 Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 2 tb drives
Not really sure what the DVD Drive is at the moment, but can pull it if anyone wants to know.

I'm trying to build a training lab and setup my first virtual servers. At the moment, my plan is to run Server 2012 with GUI as my host, and have 4 Server 2008 R2 Virtual servers, and possibly 1 Win 7 or 8 VPC at some point.

I was able to install Server 2012 on 4 1tb WD Green drives, but decided to spend the cash to upgrade HDD's. I wasn't stoked about how the RAID had been setup on the 1tb Drives as I could only get the RAID to work as MBR Disks. I setup RAID 5, and created another RAID within to get all of my disk space recognized in the end. I also had to create a D Drive during the install to not lose some space (If I remember that right. I was shooting from the hip on that install). I could be wrong, but I think my biggest problem at the moment is having an MBR disk. I also know I'm going to have a ton of problems down the road too, but I'm trying to get past this first one and move on from there.

I spent a ton of time researching, and trying all different configs in the BIOS to create a GPT RAID. If I set the Board SATA RAID ROM to UEFI Driver, I'm doomed from the get go. I can't get to the RAID Setup. Has anyone successfully used this driver to create a GPT Disk? Is there some setting in the BIOS I'm missing? It seems like there are a ton of similar questions out there, but nothing seems to point me in the right direction.

Thanks for the help.
 
Solution
Hi, Not sure about RAID with this board.
However, for booting from GPT you need x64 version of Windows 2008.
How I would try to do it:
Set SATA to RAID in BIOS.
Restart and Ctrl+F for configuring RAID.
Start installing Windows (UEFI mode) and at the installation window load the RAID driver and after that Shift +F10 for diskpart (look for diskpart commands). Or firstly Shift-F10 and then loading the driver.
Hopefully the RAID array is seen and I'm able to GPT format the disk.
Continue installing Windows.

Hi, Not sure about RAID with this board.
However, for booting from GPT you need x64 version of Windows 2008.
How I would try to do it:
Set SATA to RAID in BIOS.
Restart and Ctrl+F for configuring RAID.
Start installing Windows (UEFI mode) and at the installation window load the RAID driver and after that Shift +F10 for diskpart (look for diskpart commands). Or firstly Shift-F10 and then loading the driver.
Hopefully the RAID array is seen and I'm able to GPT format the disk.
Continue installing Windows.

 
Solution

ksrossmoor

Honorable
Mar 20, 2013
9
0
10,510


I'm installing Server 2012 with GUI x64 and plan to use the Hyper-V role, but I tried all of this again. I hadn't used diskpart before. I used diskpart to create the GPT, and it said it was successful. So I tried my install, and I'm still only showing 2 TB on my C drive as opposed to the roughly 5.5gb I'm expecting after system reserved space. I think it's still an MBR Disk. I still think my problem is in the BIOS setting the RAID. I'm using the Legacy ROM driver, but still think I need the UEFI Driver. I just can't create the RAID if I use that driver.

I'm also using the Windows 8 RAID driver from ASUS AMD RAID Driver V3.8.1540.3 for Windows 8 32bit & 64bit.(WHQL).
 
I suggest installing Windows 7 on single HDD, with SATA set to RAID (RAID drives connected). Then in Disk management right click the RAID volume and convert it to GPT.
Sure you can open a thread in the RAID section. Hopefully someone would have the solution.
 

ksrossmoor

Honorable
Mar 20, 2013
9
0
10,510
Alex answered part of this, but it wasn't descriptive enough for me. Here's what I did to get this setup with a RAID 5 at 5.46TB and RAID 1 with 931GB.

In the BIOS set RAID for drives 1-4 and 5-6 using the Legacy ROM Driver. Saved and bounced. After POST, Ctrl + F to set the RAID. Saved and bounced again. Back into the BIOS and enabled the UEFI Driver for my RAID. Bounced again, started installing server 2012 with GUI. During the install I set the RAID, then Shift - F10 for DISKPART.

Here's the commands I used:
List Disk
Select Disk 0
Clean
Convert GPT
Select Disk 1
Clean
Convert GPT
Exit

For there, I installed on Disk 0, and that was that. I tried almost the same steps over 20 times for installs, but never got what I needed. The main trick was enabling the UEFI Driver in the bios. You can't set the RAID using this driver, so it has to be done from the Legacy driver first. That was my biggest hang-up. Without it, even converting my disks to GPT, I would always end up with the 2 TB max and my disks ere always converted back to MBR.

Moving on to VM setups. My next problem to tackle is having multiple VMs run simultaneously. I have Win 8, and 2 instances of server 2008 installed right now. I'm pretty sure is has to do with how my VHD's are setup, but I'll post that in a new thread later.

 

ElvenArcherRLC

Honorable
Feb 25, 2012
3
0
10,510


The reason you can`t see the 5.5 is because you are running raid 5 , you can only see what is available not what will be used as redundant drives , example you set up raid 0 you will see all 4 drives 5.5 , set up raid 1 and you will see one drive , set up raid 5 you will see 2 drives because drives 3 and 4 are just copies of drives 1 and 2
 

surfergeek

Reputable
Mar 19, 2015
1
0
4,510


I think your very confused about which Raid is which I think your thinking of raid 10(0+1) that uses mirrored drives of a set of 2 stripped drives in a 4 drive setup. os will see raid 0,5,6 sets as one drive because they are striped Raid 1 you will have half the number of drives in your array. Raid 5 uses parity so you lose space based on how many drives you have in the array (ie a 4 drive 1tb each array will allocate 1/4th to parity or 1 tb) the advantage though is the more drives you put in the array the less(fractionally speaking) you will lose for parity.

A far as the issue in this post im not sure what your setup labs purpose is however it might have been better to creae the array then have a separate non raid drive with os and VM software and bootloader installed and just point them to the array internally. but im guessing that's what the raid 1 array is. the issue you were having with the legacy thing and only seeing 2tb is probly a conflict somewhere in the order you were doing something that was making It revert back to a non ahci or uefi setting and always creating the disk as MBR. i have that board and have set up multiple raid arrays and never have had to revert it to legacy rom. the best bet would have ben run an operating system installed on another drive, formatted them all as gpt individually then take that os drive out and create your array.but as long as you got it to work that's what counts

also as a side note don't be surprised if you run into problems with that array the WD green drives and all their desktop models including black series are not rated for raid 5 only 0,1 because of not having TLER enabled. this deals with how long the controller lets the hard drive correct errors before it drops it out of the array
 

ksrossmoor

Honorable
Mar 20, 2013
9
0
10,510



Nope not confused, and very familiar with raid. This was solved two years ago up in the thread. Have a raid 5 & a separate raid 1.