Raid 1 on a new build.

[wella691]

Ladies and Gentleman. I have a problem...

Over the past 24 hours ive been building my new system which consists of

Motherboard : Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi
Hard Drives : 1 x Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36GB SATA and 2 x Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATAII


The WD is for the opearting system and the 2 * seagate 320 gb drives are for data. But i want to run these in raid 1 because this is going to have all the family photos on.

Im running Windows vista 64 bit.

First question first... using my motherboard am i able to run one disk in non raid for the operating system and then 2 disks in raid 1 for 100% redundancy?

Second question... Why wont it work when i try?

I have set up the operating system on the WD disk and now im trying to raid 1 the other two disks but it wont boot into windows anymore. I can reset the bios to factory defaults and its OK again but still doesnt work as a raid disk.

third queston... Are there any jumpers i need to jump on the hard drives to allow them to raid?

Thanks in advance

Paul

 

[mkaibear]

Your BIOS is probably trying to boot off the RAID as priority. Go into the BIOS and check that the boot order does not include the RAID.

If it's a separate RAID controller and the Raptor is on that RAID controller, try moving it to the mobo SATA ports.

 

[wella691]

Well i went in the bios and completerly removed the raid volume from boot but that isnt helping. It still doesnt boot.

In the matrix storage manager i seem to be able to succesfully create the RAID and get it showing a mirrored raid. But it does show it as BOOTABLE.

And it still shows it as bootable when i go and remove it from the boot order.

Ive also set the BIOS up as :

SATA Configuration = Enhanced
Configure as = RAID

is this correct?

Any ideas? Is there a jumper on the HD that makes it bootable or data?

Thanks

Paul

 

[mkaibear]

Is there only one SATA controller on board - the Intel RAID one?

 

[wella691]

There is a Jmicron JMB363 Serial ATA RAID controller on the MoBo but only one of these connectors.

however the asus website says

"Dual RAID
The Intel P965 chipsets incorporate six Serial ATA connectors with high performance RAID functions in RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The JMicron controller provides another two Serial ATA connectors for RAID 0, 1, and JBOD functions. This motherboard is the ideal solution to enhance hard disk performance and data back up protection without the cost of add-on cards.
"

 

[mkaibear]

If you can set the board to boot off the Jmicron (which you might be able to, worth a look), try putting the Raptor on there and booting off that.

Does it boot with the RAID1 totally disconnected?

 

[wella691]

If you can set the board to boot off the Jmicron (which you might be able to, worth a look), try putting the Raptor on there and booting off that.

Thats a good idea i will try that.

some info from the manuel says.

Southbridge
- 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports
- Intel Matrix Storage Technology supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.
JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller
- 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices
- 1 x Internal SATA 3.0 Gb/s port
- 1 x External SATA 3.0 Gb/s port (SATA On-the-Go)
- Support SATA RAID 0, 1 and JBOD


If you installed Serial ATA hard disk drives, you can create a RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 configuration with the Intel® Matrix Storage Technology through the onboard Intel® ICH8R RAID controller.

• These connectors are set to Standard IDE mode by default. In Standard IDE mode, you can connect Serial ATA boot/data hard disk drives to these connectors. If you intend to create a Serial ATA RAID set using these connectors, set the [Configure SATA as] item in the BIOS to [RAID]. See section “4.3.6 IDE Configuration” on page 4-14 for details.

I seem to have tried everything and im getting rather lost on this one!

 

[wella691]

Right then we have progress i think!

Thanks to mkaibear i moved the boot over to the Sata Raid controller and left the seagates on the sata and raided them and it booted OK and installed all the necessary drivers (well it said it had and i saw it install things) and all was going well.

And in device drivers its now looking like this

Which is showing that the two drives are now as one drive ( i think)

However this isnt showing up as a drive D: for example

Its just not there

Any one any ideas?


Paul

P.S. Thanks mkaibear

 

[mkaibear]

Have you had a look in "Disk Management" to see if the disks are showing up in there?

 

[wella691]

or even a drive E

 

[wella691]

I cannot find disk management, where is it in vista??

I can see both drives in system information which is showing..

Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model Raider 1
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 0
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 0
SCSI Target ID 0
Sectors/Track 63
Size 298.09 GB (320,070,320,640 bytes)
Total Cylinders 38,913
Total Sectors 625,137,345
Total Tracks 9,922,815
Tracks/Cylinder 255

Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model WDC WD360ADFD-00NLR1 ATA Device
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 0
SCSI Target ID 1
Sectors/Track 63
Size 34.47 GB (37,013,760,000 bytes)
Total Cylinders 4,500
Total Sectors 72,292,500
Total Tracks 1,147,500
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size 34.47 GB (37,016,829,952 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 1,048,576 bytes

 

[mkaibear]

>vista

No clue.

In XP, if you right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage", it's one of the options there.

 

[wella691]

ok its in the same position for future referance and ive got this

so what my nest step? Ive never used disk management before so any help is good.

 

[mkaibear]

Right-click on the "Unallocated" volume and there should be some other options. You might have to initialise it first, or it might just be possible to partition / format it.

 

[wella691]

Well its now formatting the drive. Looks like its gonna take a while. Really hope this works!

Will report back

Paul

 

[wella691]

Success!!

Thanks for all your help.

Paul

 

[mkaibear]

Excellent!

 

[qwazzy]

I would put your photos somewhere else. I don't know about you guys, but I've had 2 Seagate drives fail on me in the past 4 months, and the tech dept. doesn't even know why.

 

[mkaibear]

When you look at the stats, Seagates are more reliable than most other drives. I've never had a Seagate fail on me, including one 9Gb one which I've had for >8 years...