ATA RAID issues with SI card and ASUS board

[luccig]

Just found this thread.. while I was waiting for my Raid 1 to "offline copy".

Here is my experience so far, maybe it will help somebody.

http://www.sabrent.com/products/line...ollerCards.htm

Product # : SBT-RDIT
Product Name : Silicon Image Ultra ATA 100/133 IDE RAID PCI Host Controller Card
For more information regarding this chipset: http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=31

What did I do and how I got here:

- had WinXP Pro NTFS running on a 160 GB Western Digital HDD.

- wanted to have a hardware RAID for safety, since I hate reinstalling lots of stuff I have on my machine. I also have an UPS.

- bought two 160 GB Seagate drives.

- tried to do clone using Norton Ghost 2003 from Windows. Probably because my source drive was NTFS .. or for some reason.. Ghost screwed up my drive. Made a temporary partition, rebooted, didn't finish copying - some error occured - then locked the machine. My system would not start anymore.

- search the internet, go crazy, etc. Lucky me I had an old PC around with a floppy drive I could disconnect and connect to my machine with a Win98 boot disk with fdisk on it.

- What happened: Ghost made a temporary partition and made it boot partition. My old partition with "ntldr" on it would sit idle. Using fdisk I made my old partition the primary partition and finally reboot and go.

- did a disk clone from WD to one SG (SG1), using a paid app, HDC Clone
(tried the free http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/clon...htm?language=1 didn't work for me.
then tried the free http://www.miray.de/order/sat.hdclone.be.html didn't work because the two drives WERE the same size. They want you to pay if clone the same size drivers, probably because they figure out you are an enterprise cloning disks, since most of the people would probably buy a bigger disk and clone the smaller one.. anyway, I bought their base edition for about 30 bucks).

- took out the WD disk.

- had to use DOS boot disk with FDISK to make the the newly cloned SG1 partition primary boot partition

- verified it boots OK from SG1 and it looks like SG1 can be used by itself, stand alone at this point.

- plugged in the RAID extension card, with SG1 as primary master (blue plug) and SG1 as secondary master. (WD still out).

- restarted the machine and press F3 when asked.

- (both SG1 and SG2 are configured as masters plugged into the RAID card and SG1 is primary now)

- then chose F2 - build mirrored set

- "automatic (no copy)" : N

- first drive: 0

- second drive: 2

- copy: y

- offline: y (which means right away.. funny language)

- autorebuild: y

- sure: damn yea

it started to say copying and it does about %3 per half hour damn ..

I am not going to stop this process, since a copy has to be done anyway. I was looking for info on the net about doing a NON-offline copy.. which would be ONLINE COPY, lol. But don't want to risk stopping the copy now, since by my calculations it should be done within 20 hours or so.. so tomorrow I should find it ready.

Cheers,
Lucian

[luccig]

About 28 hours later my second SG hdd is copied.

Now I'm rebooting winxp and about half way through the os load the machine just restarts. Again and again.. Hmm. I got this cheap card on tigerdirect.com and I guess I have what I paid for.

It seems that I have to add third party drivers to an EXISTING winxp installation, and I cannot do that.

I can get to the safe boot screen or but then when it loads, the progress bar completes and then in about 3 seconds the machine restarts..

Help :-)

I got some interesting info from Silicon Image website, http://12.24.47.40/display/2/index.a...=2&r=0.2131769

NOTE: If your controller card is set up as an IDE card, you cannot simply install the RAID driver to get RAID functionality. You must have the RAID BIOS loaded in your card as well. Depending on your card's manufacturer, updating the BIOS may or may NOT be possible. If your card's BIOS is stored in FLASH memory, you can search for "680 BIOS" in this knowledge base for the RAID BIOS and a FLASH utility.

If your storage controller card uses an EPROM to store the BIOS (any chip starting with 27Cxxx), then you cannot update your BIOS without a PROM programmer machine.

Silicon Image is a semi-conductor manufacturer. We do not make or sell any of the IDE/RAID storage controller cards themselves. We provide reference schematics, drivers, and BIOS to third party card manufacturers, but cannot be certain of the final design that they implement in production.

Not sure it applies to me though, since my board sees the raid, fdisk sees it, the OS half way loads, etc.

[luccig]

Copy paste from troubleshooting forum, just wanted to mention the issue is solved.

....

Done and works! Current running XP system with just the HDD replaced with a pair of mirrored new drives.

I'll summarize it here, maybe it will help somebody.

1. had a windows xp system running and wanted to add a cheap raid to it for safety (also have an ups)

2. got 2 new hdd-s and a pci eide raid extension card, Sabrent, based on SiliconImage chip, 680U (the card was about 30 bucks)

3. installed the pci card and drivers into the current running system. also the card config app, "Medley" very useful later on for monitoring, rebuilding, etc.

4. cloned current hdd using Acronis True Image Home into the two new hdds, identical only in size (not important though, you could clone onto any bigger size hdd).

5. removed the old hdd and plugged in the other two, both masters, into the pci raid.

6. start, raid config, (F3 on my case); surprise, it does not see one drive; found out that I was using one new 80 pin cable and my old 80 pin cable; when I replaced my old one and used both identical (yellow) 80 pin cables that came with the raid card, both hdd appeared!! (probably a bad old cable.. but the old system was running with it and also the new hdds if plugged into the mb, where recognized and running ok.. at least it seemed that way)

7. into raid config, made a raid set (F2) then chose mirrored set (F2) then chose non copy (I already had identical hdd-s.. copying took me 28 hours before using the raid card copy utility - later on found that I could use HDClone or Acronis to copy in less than 4 hours..)

8. sure? damn yeah

9. reboots, Acronis was the last operation done, so now Acronis kicked in and said all done, then Windows boot-ed OK and running.

10. manually shutdown to check everything ok; at the start up, Windows would only load half way, reboot again and again. !!!

11. then tried this: after reboot.. opened Windows safe mode menu and chose "Last good configuration" which probably was the one Acronis started up.. and it went through!! XP loads OK.

12. after windows startup, Medley monitoring app pops up and says "Even occurred" .. looking into Medley Config and it rebuilds one of the mirrored HDD.. but it does it nicely and automatically in the background..

13. Reboot. Everything works, tested and checked.

Voila. New RAID PCI card with two new mirrored HDDs, cloned after my old HDD (that I keep now as a spare and backup)

/Lucian