UPDATE: Win2k is hanging now: setting up RAID array

[TheOverlord]

I've been working on setting up my new server for 4 hours now and have reached the end of my wits...

I have a Rioworks PDB-R mobo and dual p2-400s. The hdds are 2 WD 20gb drives but they arent exactly identical, one is slightly larger than the other, i had read that this was ok it would just duplicate the size of the smaller of the 2 drives so i would lose a few mb from the larger drive but no big deal.

I installed both drives but one of them seems to not work as a master only as a slave, if i jumper it for master it isnt recognized, but on slave or cable select it is. I tried different ata cables but to no avail. Each drive is on its own cable (i.e. one on ide0 the other on ide1). I settled for this and tried to setup the array which went thru just fine in the fasttrak setup utility but when i rebooted and tried to format using fdisk I cannot delete the existing partitions that were on prior to the drives being raided...

So:
1. Will non-identical drives work?
2. Can a slave on ide0 and a master on ide1 work together in raid?
3. Do i need to fdisk the drives outside of a raid array so that they are clear before raiding them?

Thanks for your help, and any other tidbits from those of you experienced with RAID are certainly welcome...

Ok, I finally got them both to work...one seems to not want to run as a master and i had to set the other to slave as well. I copied over the i386 folder from my win2k cd and ran the install no probs, when the dos portion of the setup was done it needed to restart and i did...now it hangs at a blue screen with a message liek this:
<begin error message>
STOP: (0x000000F7, 0x003HA6F7, 0x000000G7, 0x000000A7) 0x00000007
Boot Drive failure

Recommend running chkdsk /f to resolve problems and run a virus scan, blah, blah...
<end error meassage>

What does this mean? I just got the drives so they should be fine. I'm running a full scandsk w/ surface scan as we speak but I doubt its going to help much. Ideas? Thoughts?


seems that one of the drives is bad so its RMA time, thanks for all your help tho

 

[Athlon4all]

1. Yes, you've got the right idea about the smaller drive
2. Dunno about that one, I've never setup a RAID array
3. Nope, just setup the array in the RAID Bios, and then in fdisk the array will just look like a single 40GB drive.

 

[TheOverlord]

new problem bump

 

[Kartajan]

I have (zero) experience with RAID, so this is just my guess.

1. go in each drive individually and remove partitions with FDISK, but don't make a new one
2. Start back up, configuring RAID via BIOS and setup utility
3. Run FDISK on your RAID array
4. format/ install win

If this doesn't work, wait for the RAID experts to say something...

 

[papadoum]

I presume your trying to run RAID0? Both drives must be masters for this to run correctly, there should be a separate RAID BIOS which is to be accessed to set up your RAID arrays, in this you decide which h/d will be the boot sector(I'm only talking from my yonks of research on the KT7A with 98SE, so this may not apply with your setup)on my system it requires to hit Ctrl and H on boot to enter the bios when the prompt is given in same fashion that it does for 'del'. Of course when setting up the array it wipes your h/d's clean, and all partitions on them. You then have to fdisk(is this used with W2K?) and create primary partition/boot sectors and any other partitions you want to have, then a cold restart boots them to then format those partitions in useable formats for the O/S. Also with h/d's, the system simply chooses the smallest one and treats the other as the same size, but you must really make sure they're the same ATA rating and rpm (eg 7200rpm) or that will cause nice headaches, also RAID 0 is best to use 16k clusters as that's how the striping is set up. Anyway, hope this is close to what your looking for..