Hard Drive Size Limitation?

[redeyedog]

Hi. I still have a P4C800 -E Deluxe motherboard. I have been using a 500GB RAID 0 array as my boot drive WinXP SP3. These drives use the IDE portion of the Promise 378 controller.

I want to upgrade the drives using 2 Western Digital 32MB 640GB SATA drives to create another RAID 0 array. Then boot into XP and clone the old boot drive (Original RAID 0 array) to the new drive (New RAID 0 array 2xWD SATA).

I thought this shouyld have been totally easy but after getting the new drives plugged in, the fasttrack utility hangs when both of the new SATA drives are plugged in, regarless if I have the old array online or not.

I have had a RAID 0+1 array using 4 160GB drives (2 PATA x 2 SATA) and all worked fine. Those drives finally failed and I moved into the 500GB RAID 0 array. So, I checked the cables and that's not the problem.

I'm stumped! Only thing I can think of is maybe a Promise 1TB limitation?? Documention hasn't been helpfull. Any ideas?

PS. I know my MB is old.

 

[hotroderx]

I may be wrong so you might want to wait for a different answer and I am assuming your fast track utility might be the cause depending on how its trying to migrate the OS and information over from the original array to the new array I would think there would be a conflict from direct copying a 1tb drive to a 1.25tb array its looking for the 1tb and isn't finding it instead its finding more room then it originally had thus confusing and locking up the software. If I was you I would do a clean install and start from scratch see if u still have the same problem. If you do you know there a good chance it might be a limitation with the raid controller or the board if not then chances are its your utility.



I really hope this answers your questions sorry its not more in detail and I had to guess on your utility but I tried looking it up on Google and it brought up everything but a utility lol

 

[redeyedog]

Thanks HotRoderX!! It seems that my original diagnosis was flawed because after checking the basics yet again, I found that one of the SATA cables I was doing was incompatible with the other one. That's right.. It's not bad, just incompatible when used in the array. The cable works fine on a separate hard drive on a separate controller. Wierd...

I still haven't got the 640GB RAID 0 to work for me. I refuse to dump my installation so I tried ghosting the old drive to the new drive. XP didn't like that. I think what happened was the new drive was assigned a drive letter (by WinXP) so when I reboot, the physical drive letter changes to C: but XP's registry shows it as F:

I verified this when trying to do a repair using the manufacturer's OS disc. It saw the old XP installation and offered the "R" but later it would lose track of where the configuration files were. A dialog popped up (that is not supposed to) looking for outlookmsu.msi. Upon browsing, I noticed that the new drive was recognized as F: drive and no C: drive in sight!!

I'm trying the ghost thing again, this time I didn't assign a drive letter to the new RAID array. Fortunately, Norton Ghost has an option to reveal "hidden" drives and there it was. I'm optimistic that XP the new array will boot and XP will notice that the drive is missing a drive letter and assign it one.

Well see..

 

[redeyedog]

Worked like a charm. I'm happy...