Hardware

Question

Gravatar
Locked

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?

This conversation is currently closed to new comments.

10 total posts (Page 1 of 1)  
Thread display: Collapse - | Expand +

All Answers

gravatar
Collapse -

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?

gravatar
Collapse -

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).

gravatar
Collapse -

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?

gravatar
Collapse -

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.

gravatar
Collapse -

RAID5 versus RAID10 (or even RAID3 or RAID4)

by Peconet Tietokoneet In reply to Question about RAID 5
gravatar
Collapse -

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.

gravatar
Collapse -

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.

gravatar
Collapse -

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

gravatar
Collapse -

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.

gravatar
Collapse -

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...

Back to Hardware Forum
10 total posts (Page 1 of 1)  

Start or search

Related Discussions

Related Forums