10k, 146Gb SAS drives

TriedandTested

TriedandTested

TriedandTested

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Joined
11 Jul 2004
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Hi,

Having a bit of a problem with a new PowerEdge server with a PERC controller. It has four SAS drives installed, two are raided with the OS on and the other two are for storage etc.

Problem is that drive 0 and drive 1 (raided) are only showing up in win2k3 64bit R2 as a very small drive; about 12gb. The other two aren't showing up at all.

Any ideas?
 
Yeah, looked there; two of the four drives are showing...drive 0 has been partitioned to 12gb and has 134 or so GB unallocated. The second 146gb is all unallocated.

Drives 2 and 3 don't even appear. The lights on the SAS drives are green but no activity.

When setting up the server using the Dell management thing i stipulated that i wanted the drive 0 and 1 in RAID 1 so the OS has a nice backup if things go wrong.

I wanted the other two drives (not showing) for storage.

Help.
 
Sounds like there's something up with the RAID setup at the hardware level. The OS reckons it has 2 disks available, the RAID1 array should show as a single disk so this raises the question as to what Disk1 in Disk Management actually represents. Curiosity would lead me to create a partition on Disk1, write something to it and see which disks light up.

At this point I'd guess that the card thinks it has a pair of RAID1 arrays, each of a pair of disks. Can you take a look at the RAID config and confirm how the disks are allocated.
 
all four drives are showing up fine in the Dell OpenManager Admin software...have tested (blinked on then off) drives 2 and 3 and they are ok. Just not being recognised in Win2k3 as per my previous post.

Annoying. Will have a play further but any suggestions would be great.
 
Yes. looks like Disk 0 and 1 are virtual disk 1 and disk 2 and 3 are virtual disk 2. Not how i wanted it to be set up.

I want 0 and 1 in RAID 1 and disk 2 and 3 as separate drives (not in RAID).

I may start from scratch using the Dell software to set up then install win2k3 from afresh. Good idea?
 
You should be able to reconfigure physical disks 2 & 3 on the fly without a reinstall. There are no defined partitions so no data should be lost, hopefully should just be a case of deleting the virtual drive 1 and recreating two new virtual drives each with a single physical disk.
 
I've tried...but the Dell software isn't the easiest thing in the world to use/understand. I've not had experience setting up RAID like this before.

I think i have drive 0 and 1 working fine now, showing up as the full 140-odd gig. Still can't get drives 2 and 3 to show anywhere within Windows.

Are there any other tools that i could try?
 
Bump.

The two drives not seen have a status of 'ready' in the system management tools (DELL), the ones working are set to 'online'. I can't see anyway of changing this.

They all seem to be on the same controller too.
 
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