Installing multiple Raid controllers

[Xtremegamer]

Hi all,

I am building a new high def video editing system based on the Asus® A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard and the AMD FX60 chip.

Here is what I have installed and running so far:

Tai Chi case c/w liquid cooling
A8R32-MVP Mobo
AMD® Athlon™ 64 - FX-60 CPU
ATI X1900XT Crossfire Main VPU
ATI X1900XT Secondary board running in crossfire mode
Enermax® Liberty 620W ATX 12V Ver 2.2 Power Supply
OCZ 2Gb PC3200 DDR EL Dual Channel Platinum XTC Edition
2 x 150GB Western Digital® Raptor™ SATA-150 10,000RPM 16Mb System & Application Drive Raid 0 off Uli Controller
2 x 500GB Western Digital® Caviar® SE16 SATAII-300 7200RPM 16Mb Video editing array. Right now, Raid 0 off the Uli controller but would like to switch them to the Promise controller.

ok, here is my problem. I have two more 500 GB WD drives I need to get working. I purchased the Promise® FastTrak® TX4310 SATA Raid Controller card thinking I could install it and have all four 500 GB drives running off of it as one 2 TB editing drive. (I know, big failure possibility but I will back up all important data to an external 1TB drive)

My system has Windows XP Pro installed on the Raptors and everything works great until I install the 4310 card. I get the Bios startup screen, I can select all four 500 GB drives as a single array but then I get an error saying I have no bootable drives. It appears that once I install the 4310 card that the on-board Uli Raid controller is no longer recognized.

First question, is this something I can do, install a separate Raid controller card and make it work?

If so, how do I make the system recognize both the 4310 AND the Uli raid controllers?

Thank you so much for the replies. I greatly appreciate any and all help or suggestions you care to share.

Take care

 

[Pain]

You want to use the 4 500g disks in one array but on seperate controllers? Don't think that is going to work. You might be able to do a software raid within windows, but I'm not sure pro will support a software raid. Or, you need to get a raid 5 controller so you can put all 4 disks on one array....or, of course you can use JBOD array, but you'll still need another controller to support 4 disks.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You may need to change the boot order in your bios. It sounds like it's trying to boot from your promise card instead of the uli array.

 

[Pain]

Oh yeah, that's true for the boot sequence.

As for the array, I'm still not certain you can have the 4 disks in one array unless it's a raid 5 or a JBOD array, but I'm probably not reading it correctly.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You can RAID 0 as many drives as your controller supports. If the promise cards supports 4 drives, they he can create a RAID 0 array using all 4 drives.

I don't recommend a 2TB RAID 0 array, but he said he's backing up to another drive that isn't on the array.

 

[Xtremegamer]

Update:

I have tried again to install the Promise FastTrak 4310 and once I do, my Uli Raid setup goes missing. I mean it's just gone. I can't see the drives in Bios at all.

Once I remove the Promise card my Uli comes back and everything works fine. So much for plug & play.

I'm thinking this may be an IRQ issue. My Promise Bios setup program shows the IRQ set to 10. I'm not sure if this is a conflict but this may be where I'm having my trouble.

Can anyone confirm this?

Thanks again

 

[Pain]

I wouldn't worry too much about not seeing the disks in the bios. I would expect though to see the controller setup menu when booting, but honestly I have never tried to use multiple raid controllers....well, actually I have. In servers there is sometimes an onboard controller and a controller card, and you always see 2 raid setup menus appears when booting.

 

[Snave]

Was there ever a resolution to this topic because I'm having similar issues.

I have a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with two 80GB WD HD's in a RAID 1 array using the onboard RAID Controller (SiI3114 Silicon RAID Controller) which has the OS(Win2k3 Server Standard Edition R2) loaded onto it. Everything boots fine until I install my Highpoint RocketRAID Controller Card into the board and start up.

During boot up, where the Silicon RAID Controller would see the two Hard drives and give me the option to go into the Controller's BIOS, the same thing happens except it seems to stop or get interrupted and I can't go into its BIOS. Instead in mid boot of the Silicon RAID Controller, the RocketRAID Controller boots up and allows me to go into it.

After it finishes, the BIOS tries to boot the OS except it can't see the two Hard Drives that are in RAID 1 because the Silicon RAID Controller never initialized properly so it goes to a blank screen and then reboots. Then it goes through the boot process all over again and ends up in an endless reboot loop.

Any ideas or solutions would be most appreciated.
-Dennis

 

[brentdog]

I'm having a very similar problem as well. Here is my setup:

Giga-Byte GA-8I945P-G motherboard (latest F11 BIOS)
Onboard GigaRAID IT8212 IDE RAID controller (latest 1.7.1 BIOS)
- 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300R0 300GB ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drives in RAID-0
Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI-e x1 controller (V10 BIOS)
- 2 HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722525DLA380 250GB 7200 RPM SATA II 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives in RAID-0.

With the RocketRAID controller installed, I get the RocketRAID BIOS screen but do not even see the GigaRAID BIOS screen and, of course, the array does not show up in Windows at all (XP Pro SP2). If I disable INT 13 support on the RocketRAID, then the GigaRAID works fine. But, of course, this means I can't boot off of the RocketRAID, which defeats the whole purpose of having it. I played with all the other BIOS settings on the RocketRAID (Reallocate EBDA, Boot disk hook last, Private stack size), nothing seemed to work. I also played with all the boot options in the motherboard BIOS. And I tried the card on both PCI-Express slots on my motherboard. All to no avail.

Interestingly enough, the RocketRAID is an upgrade to an Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA PCI card which worked great, perfectly cooexisting with the GigaRAID and allowing me to boot off of either through motherboard BIOS. Perhaps this indicates a problem with the motherboard in dealing with controller cards on the PCI-Express bus. Unfortunately, I don't have any other cards to try.

I have an email into Highpoint tech support. But if anyone here has any advice or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Brent

 

[beezdat]

I'm having a very similar problem as well. Here is my setup:

Giga-Byte GA-8I945P-G motherboard (latest F11 BIOS)
Onboard GigaRAID IT8212 IDE RAID controller (latest 1.7.1 BIOS)
- 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300R0 300GB ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drives in RAID-0
Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI-e x1 controller (V10 BIOS)
- 2 HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722525DLA380 250GB 7200 RPM SATA II 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives in RAID-0.

With the RocketRAID controller installed, I get the RocketRAID BIOS screen but do not even see the GigaRAID BIOS screen and, of course, the array does not show up in Windows at all (XP Pro SP2). If I disable INT 13 support on the RocketRAID, then the GigaRAID works fine. But, of course, this means I can't boot off of the RocketRAID, which defeats the whole purpose of having it. I played with all the other BIOS settings on the RocketRAID (Reallocate EBDA, Boot disk hook last, Private stack size), nothing seemed to work. I also played with all the boot options in the motherboard BIOS. And I tried the card on both PCI-Express slots on my motherboard. All to no avail.

Interestingly enough, the RocketRAID is an upgrade to an Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA PCI card which worked great, perfectly cooexisting with the GigaRAID and allowing me to boot off of either through motherboard BIOS. Perhaps this indicates a problem with the motherboard in dealing with controller cards on the PCI-Express bus. Unfortunately, I don't have any other cards to try.

I have an email into Highpoint tech support. But if anyone here has any advice or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Brent

I am having a similar problem as well. I have two raid controllers on my msi 760gm-e51 mobo and the onboard raid. I have two mirror arrays on my onboard raid, and two raid 5's on my other two raid cards. when i connect the second raid card, my onboard raid seems to disappear from the post screen and bios. When i disconnect the second raid card, the onboard reappears..... driving me nuts trying to figure this out....