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Unable to format RAID5 volume as Basic Disk?
I have recently built a custom 8TB storage server, using an Asus P5E WS Professional mb, Intel 6350 chip, 2GB of Kingstom 800Mhz RAM, an 80GB PATA HDD solely for Windows 2003 Server (R2), and for the RAID array itself a HighPoint RocketRAID 3320 8channel RAID controller. Each of the 8 SATA channels on the controller has a 1TB HDD, so after the RAID5 array was initalized, there was ~6.6TB of disk volume space available.
After the array was set up, I booted up Windows and checked in Disk management, and I saw my volume sitting there as 6.6TB of available space. However, the problem is that I cannot create/format a partition of ANY size. I tried to do so at full size, then I scaled down to test as low as a 50GB partition. Whenever I do so, the process stops immediately at the Formatting stage, stating that Windows cannot complete the formatting operation.
The volume immediately switches to ?Healthy?, however it shows as 0 capacity. We?ve deleted the RAID array from the Highpoint BIOS utility and rebuilt it, and Windows once again sees the Basic disk at 6.6TB, but it refuses to format it.
Now, for some more tests. I tried a "Quick format" and that worked. I got a partition of 6.6TB, and was able to copy files to it. But a full format, there is no success.
Additionally, we tested converting the volume from a Basic disk to a Dynamic disk, and then it did allow a full format.
I am uneasy about simply leaving it at that, however. I'd like to figure out exactly why the Basic volume will not format.
We installed Windows 2003 Server R2, with all service packs and updates in place.