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  • #2202458

    Question about RAID 5

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    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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    • #2944972

      Clarifications

      by jaymzkerten ·

      In reply to Question about RAID 5

      Clarifications

    • #2944503

      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?

      • #2944447

        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).

        • #2945480

          Is the data cable

          by tonythetiger ·

          In reply to Not sure on BIOS

          [i](for some reason, it stays on with a solid green light and won’t read the disks). [/i]

          on upside down?

        • #2945395

          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.

    • #2944494

      RAID5 versus RAID10 (or even RAID3 or RAID4)

      by peconet tietokoneet ·

      In reply to Question about RAID 5

      • #2944443

        Seems interesting, but….

        by jaymzkerten ·

        In reply to RAID5 versus RAID10 (or even RAID3 or RAID4)

        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.

        • #2945500

          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.

    • #2944381

      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

      • #2945552

        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.

    • #2945508

      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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