I need some Iwill KA266-R help (RAID and OS Install)

[longcat]

OK I'm about to the end of my rope. I have a KA266-R. I currently have 3 hard drives in it on the onboard RAID Controller. On channel 0 I have 2 drives and on channel 1 I have a single drive. On my IDE channels I have a zip drive on one and a CDR on the other. Both of the IDE channel drives are set to Cable Select (currently) They are detected as Master of their respective channels at post. I have set up the three hard drives as striped in the RAID bios. The slave from channel 0 and the master from channel 1 are striped and the master from channel 0 is striped by itself. The array with 2 drives is selected as bootable, size was set to 32, and write cache was enabled.

I then was having trouble seeing the drives when trying to boot with a win98 boot disk so I went into the Iwill bios and disabled the IDE channels. It then booted and let me FDISK the drives for partitioning and setting the active partition, which I did.

After that I rebooted and turned the IDE channels back on in the bios. I then proceeded to boot off of a Windows 2000 Adv Server boot disks. I hit F6 to load my RAID driver went through all the motions and got to the the final disk where it said it was starting Windows 2000 setup and it just flat out hung. I let it sit for 30min and nothing.

I had just finished installing win98 on another computer (this one was the SDRAM version of the same Iwill board) It too is set up in RAID but with only on drive per RAID channel and one dvd drive on the regular IDE channel. I booted off the disks like I was going to do a setup and had no problems like above.

I have tried multiple settings for the above computer. I set all the drives to cable select, I've assigned which are master and slave, I've even tried this with a single drive on each RAID channel and still come up with the same problem. The only thing I can see that is different is the fact that all the drives in the new setup are different sizes, which shouldn't matter but....

Can anyone help me, I'm running out of ideas and tired of loosing sleep the past 2 nights. E-mail me at jpn1833@yahoo.com if you can. I can get to that address from work.

 

[Democritus10]

I've had similar problems with this crap motherboard (I've already had to return a previous one because I couldn't do a warm reboot and the BIOS would keep dissapearing. Now I'm having RAID problems with the new board. First, I had the same problem of fdisk (or any other similar utilities) finding my 2 drives set-up with RAID 0. I have Quantum drives and the Quantum disk manager (for formatting and partitioning) finds the array as 1 drive of 1k (they should be 60GB!). And it tells me that there's a serious geometry problem...whatever that means.
Your idea of disabling the IDE channels might be a good one...hopefully it'll work for me.

Now the following MIGHT help you out. Although the fdisk program couldn't detect my disk array when RAIDed, I attempted to install windows 2000 professional with the floppy boot diskettes. As for you, it would always get to the end of disk 4 ("starting windows 2000&quot and then freeze (I left it for 30min in case it was 'thinking')...I had done the F6 RAID driver setp as well. Then I noticed that the RAID BIOS on my motherboard was called MegaRAID by AMI. BUT crapass IWILL had given me the driver disk (which was used during windows 2000 configuration) for Hyperdisk RAID BIOS -- NOT the same as MegaRAID (although they look the same)!!

So hoping that the real MegaRAID drivers were included in the power installer CD that came with the board, I booted off the IWILL CD. Sure enough, there's a choice to make a diskette for a RAID driver. I followed the simple directions and made the RAID driver diskette. I compared this to the floppy that came with the board...sure enough, they were different. Fortunately, the diskette I made off the CD had the driver for the MegaRAID BIOS.

I went ahead and attempted to re-install Windows 2000 with the 4 setup Win2000 diskettes. I did the F6 RAID driver install function and installed the MegaRAID driver. This time, I got past the 'Starting Windows 2000' screen (although it did take a few minutes) and got to the part when you can set up the partitions. My drives were detected properly as being 60GB total (but this is the MegaRAID driver working, not anything to do with WIN2000 itself). However, I kept getting a message that the partition/format of my drive was not compatible with WIndows2000 and that I should go back to the previous screen and format it with a WIN2000-compatible structure. Well gee, there really isn't an option for that so that's where I'm stuck at. I tried rebooting and doing fdisk, quantum disk manager, the works. Fdisk says that there are no fixed disks, quantum says that I have a 1k drive and that it has a serious geometry problem! Maybe it will work for you since you actually got fdisk to recognize your drive. I will attempt to disable the IDE channels and relinstall win2000.

Please let me know if this works for you. I don't know whether they gave you the wrong driver diskette as well.

It's really unfortunate that they're churning out boards that have not been checked for quality. I've built about 50 systems and this is the first time that I've had such a bad board (let alone 2 in a row of the same model). I'll be staying away from IWILL after these 2 incidents. And their manual is loaded with lots of misinformation as well (not to mention countless grammatical errors).

 

[Technonut]

<< The only thing I can see that is different is the fact that all the drives in the new setup are different sizes, which shouldn't matter but.... >>


In my experience, it is always better to have exact size/model hard drives if you are configuring a RAID setup. I also would have the drives jumpered as master on their own RAID channels. What type/size drives are you using?

Democritus10, The KA266R is not a POS if setup properly. I used the KA266R as a backup system, and it was very stable and dependable. IWill has some of, if not the best tech support/RMA service that I have had the pleasure of dealing with. I had a problem with a KK266R, phoned IWill, actually spoke with tech support in a quick amount of time, and had an RMA # in minutes. I sent the board back by Priority Mail, and IWill had the replacement shipped within 2 days of receiving the board I sent.

 

[Democritus10]

Technonut, I hope you're right regarding their technical service department and RMA service...I might have to utilize both of them in the near future. I don't doubt that IWill boards run great when set up properly (by the manufacturer and consumer). The problem is when you get the ones with defects that did not get caught with whatever filtering system they might have. Thus far, I've heard of people having to use several 'tricks' in order to get their KA266-R to function properly. When the user cannot do a straightforward and intuitive setup and make the system run properly, I believe that to be the fault of the manufacturers. I've had 2 KA266-R boards in the past week that have been an extreme pain to configure...I've failed at both. Probability-wise, that's pretty significant for defects/quirks. I build computer systems on a regular basis and it's a part of my job as well. If these boards gave me this much trouble, what is an average homebuilder who has experience with only a few system builds supposed to do?

Sorry, I'm just letting some of my frustration out.

 

[silky]

Longcat and Demoncritus: There is a complete FAQ article for Iwill KK266/R at www.fullon3d.com. And if that doesn't help you go to www.amdmb.com, go to the forums and there is a Iwill forum with great people that will help you out.

 

[longcat]

For those who care I got this working. Had to go in the bios and set the fail safe defaults option to enabled and also had to enable the flashable bios. Install works like a charm, even with my different size drives and all drives set to cable select. I currently have 120GB in my server using drives I had. Pretty cool. Thanks for the help.

Jon

 

[Democritus10]

I was able to get my system to work also, thanks to the help of longcat. All I had to do was set my Zip drive setting to 'NONE' in the BIOS. Everything is working properly now.