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Question about RAID 5

By jaymzkerten ·
Ok, so I *had* a RAID 5 setup in my computer, using 3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives, and everything worked perfectly fine. I decided that I wanted to up the capacity of my raid, so I decided to add 2 more 1TB drives to that (both also barracuda's). I got the ports on my mobo configured to RAID, and then I deleted the RAID and recreated it with all 5 drives included, and it showed up in the Nvidia Mediashield RAID controller as a whole RAID (capacity of 3.63TB). I proceeded to boot into WinXP, and the drive won't show up in the Disk Management. I look under Device Manager and I can see the RAID there, but if I try to populate it, it gives no disk size and an unknown disk type.

I've tried bringing it back down to the original 3 drives, and it works fine again, and I've tried using varying combinations of just 4 drives to no avail.

Is there some sort of strange limitation by WinXP on the capacity of a RAID, or is there likely some other setting I need to change to get it to support this high of a capacity?

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Long shot

by alxcsby In reply to Question about RAID 5

Back in the day, BIOS set size limitations on drives, as did the formatting style.
Are your drives formatted NTFS or FAT32/NTFS?
Do you know if you're on the latest update of your BIOS software?

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Not sure on BIOS

by jaymzkerten In reply to Long shot

I have managed to boot it up and format each drive independently (as NTFS), and I was able to save files to each drive just fine.

Now another thing I hadn't thought to try originally was to see if one of my 3 original drives paired with the 2 new drives as a 3 drive RAID5 would work, and that also didn't show up in disk management upon boot into XP.

I haven't updated the BIOS yet, as I'm also having difficulty with the FDD not working (for some reason, it stays on with a solid green light and won't read the disks).

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Is the data cable

by TonytheTiger In reply to Not sure on BIOS

(for some reason, it stays on with a solid green light and won't read the disks).

on upside down?

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Nope

by jaymzkerten In reply to Is the data cable

It's a keyed FDD cable, so unless I *really* forced it into the slot, there's not really much of a way I *could* put that in upside down.

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RAID5 versus RAID10 (or even RAID3 or RAID4)

by Peconet Tietokoneet In reply to Question about RAID 5
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Seems interesting, but....

by jaymzkerten In reply to RAID5 versus RAID10 (or e ...

My mobo doesn't support RAID10. It supports RAID 1, 0, 0+1, 5, and JBOD. Another thing to note: this is for my computer at home, not a server I'm running at work. The raid won't be accessed constantly, and especially not while I'm rebuilding a drive.

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Raid5 Not while I'm rebuilding a drive?.

by Peconet Tietokoneet In reply to Seems interesting, but... ...

Actually (if you have hot swap) you can have your computer on while Raid5 re-builds, though like i said you will have to have hotswap drive bays for this but you can get them built into a case. With any raid system it is nearly always constant, with Raid5 it has to be constant. I thought i just give you a small bit of reading so that you can choose which Raid you will want to set up on your system. No harm in that anyway.
Hope all goes well.

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Unknown Disk

by Jacemg In reply to Question about RAID 5

From Microsoft Technet:

A basic or dynamic volume's status is Unknown.

Cause: The Unknown status occurs when the boot sector for the volume is corrupted (possibly due to a virus) and you can no longer access data on the volume. The Unknown status also occurs when you install a new disk but do not successfully complete the wizard to create a disk signature.

Solution: Initialize the disk. For instructions describing how to initialize a disk, see Initialize new disks:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc782513(WS.10).aspx

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Nope

by jaymzkerten In reply to Unknown Disk

I've already booted all the drives individually and initialized all of them. After that I actually created a partition and saved data to them to verify that they were working properly.

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Sounds like you skipped a step.

by TonytheTiger In reply to Question about RAID 5

You have to use the raid utility to create a container for a logical volume. THEN you should be able to Fdisk and format the volume.

Next time... most raid controllers allow adding additional drives and growing the volume onto them...

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