Need Help ... SCSI RAID with compaq card

[Junkcollector]

I picked up an old compaq proliant with dual pentitum pros and the compaq smart scsi array controller. I have (4) 4.3gb scsi drives with a raid 5 setup. When I boot up with win2k and it as me to partition the single logical drive....

I tried to max out the partition which is 12776mb and formatted, then installed win2k. The initial files were copied over successfully, but when the computer rebooted, it states a hard drive error or some kind.

Okay .. then I tried a partition of 4000mb and with that I'm able to install win2k with ease.

I'm trying to find out how large I can set my partition to maximize the disk space with a raid 5 setup. Also, want to know what the max partition could be for a raid 0+1 setup.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Junkcollector]

FORGET, I tried a partition of 9000mb and still get the disk error when the computer reboots.

 

[kief]

OOPS<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by kief on 06/21/02 06:28 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[kief]

What is the error? It may help us to help you if we knew what the actual problem was other then "a hard drive error".

Taking a guess the most common error you will get in this situation is "inaccessible boot device". If thats the error you are getting you will need to get the device driver for the SCSI card on a floppy disk. During Windows install (at the very beginning) it says "push F6 to install third party drivers" or something like that. Pushing F6 will later in the install trigger a prompt for drivers.....

Jesus saves, but Mario scores!!!

 

[ath0mps0]

NT (and in some cases 2000) has problems with boot (system in MS speak) partitions larger than 4GB (base 2 - 4,294,967,296 bytes). I generally configure a 4GB boot/system partition for the OS and apps and use the rest of the space for user/app data. Another option is to create a small ~50MB boot partition and install the OS and data to the remaining space.

If the thought I thought I thought had been the thought I thought, I wouldn't have thought so much.

 

[kief]

I have not seen that problem in 2000 at all. It would help if we knew the exact error in any case =)

Jesus saves, but Mario scores!!!

 

[Junkcollector]

Thanks a lot for all the input. I dont remember the exact error message ...something like

error writing to disk
press ctrl-alt-delete to restart

Right now the computer is working fine but i have three 4gb partitions. I really want just 1 partition since all the data will still be on the RAID 5 array anyways.

Oh Well