FDISK and FORMAT on KT7 RAID

KuSang

Junior Member
Sep 4, 2000
16
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The system:
1 Gig Athlon
KT7 RAID
356M pc133 Micron RAM
2 IBM deskstar 30 gig ATA100 drives (brand new)

The two IBM deskstars are on the RAID controller (IDE 3 & 4). The
partitioning took FOREVER. 12 hours to check the drive integrity twice like
fdisk likes to. Just made it one big primary DOS partition. Now, the
format just isn't moving AT ALL. It's stuck at 0%. Am I doing something
wrong? The blocks on the raid were set to 16k per Paul's faq. I didn't do
the /z:32 with the format command so just a "format c:". It's just plain
jane W98, not SE or ME. Please help.

KuSang
 

HighFidelity

Junior Member
Sep 30, 2000
6
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More or less the same setup as mine even down to the IBM drives (but you have a better CPU). I set my 2 drives up but used a 64K block and they Fdisked and formatted fine (20 gig c: and 40 gig d:)they seemed to be nice and fast too. Only think is I now cannot seem to get past 100% coping files on the Windows ME setup, but will have a look at that today.

All I can suggest is recreating the array with 64K blocks it seemed to work for me, unless you have a problem with one of your drives.
 

KuSang

Junior Member
Sep 4, 2000
16
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0
I got it. Put them separately on the main IDE's and turns out one is bad. Thanks for the input.

Kusang
 

NiPNi

Member
Sep 26, 2000
75
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I have same setup: KT7-RAID, 2*IBM ATA100 30GB.
I have another problem: Fdisk and format went fine, but the Windows installation locked up every time as long as the RAID was enabled in BIOS, so installing Windows on the RAID array was impossible! I had to disable RAID, install to another disk (IBM ATA66 18GB), install the Highpoint drivers and THEN I could enable RAID. Anybody who knows why? I would really like to run my system in RAID0. I have heard that that might not be such a good idea, as the access time increases in RAID0. Any comments on that? I'm not sure, but running Windows on a RAID array sounds pretty cool to me :)
 

HighFidelity

Junior Member
Sep 30, 2000
6
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This maybe worth a look found it on a brill page (link below)

How do I install Windows directly on my RAID disks?
Many thanks to Yasin Abbas for this solution - for WindowsME but probably more generally applicable!

Windows allows it's driver database to be extended, the simple solution is to extend the current Windows driver database to include the RAID drivers (and any other drivers you wish to add). So, to do this, proceed as follows:

Setup RAID in the BIOS as usual (16K block, 16K Stripe gives best performance).
FDISK your partitions.
Format partitions (FORMAT C: /Z:X wheras X is TWICE the size of the block you want, gives best performance)
Copy over the Windows cabinet files
Copy over the RAID drivers and any other drivers in a directory of your liking (drivers must be *.inf files, not setup.exe files)
Here's the cunning bit: you will require a Windows setup batch file, here is a basic one to work from - just look at it in a text editor.
NOTE THIS SECTION:
[OEMDrivers]
; Add additional driver paths for OEM specific drivers
; Ensure each entry is separated by a semi-colon
;
HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion","OtherDevicePath",,"C:\DRV\AUDIO;C:\DRV\VIDEO"
add lines accordingly for the directory with extra drivers. This batch file came from Windows ME, all others are very similar.
Now run Windows setup in DOS with the name of the batch file, in this case: setup MSBATCH.XPR
Windows will be setup with all the drivers installed, No problems whatsoever :)
Off course this batch file is really nifty, you can set it up with your Windows product key, all Windows options, etc . . . to have the perfect windows automated reinstall. Yasin's says his batch file doesn't require him to type a product key, sets up a minimal install, with his Iiyama monitor drivers detected, Detonator 533, KT7-RAID support, network, etc and no input from him other than SETUP MSBATCH.XPR.



Found it here (Pauls Unofficial site but very good)
 

AMDfreak

Senior member
Aug 12, 2000
909
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access time does not increase with RAID 0, I don't have the exact numbers as I'm at work now, but as I remember my HD Tach was 8.9ms seek, 44xxx min x-fer, 75xxx max x-fer, and burst was off the chart at over 80 megs a sec.