Poorly Set up Ocuk System

Odin · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:21

Hi everyone,

Before starting I will admit that it was partly my fault that I did not investigate this further when I had the chance.

About less than a year ago I purchased an Ultima Vanquish pre built system from Ocuk. I had specifically ordered having two western digital RE3 drive to be placed in raid 0 and for the operating system etc to be placed there. The 1 tb drive would be used purely as storage.

Upon receiving the system I realised that something was strange when I could see a raw drive which was unusable. I called Ocuk systems support that insisted that this was normal and that everything was ok.

Recently I purchased a 2tb western digital drive from Ocuk as my 1tb Seagate barracuda was giving problems (story of seagates it seems). It was here that i realised that from some reason the boot info had been placed on the 1tb drive and I have had to start completely from scratch once again due to this.

Now during this time I have realised that the raid had not been set up properly. Infact it definately had not been set as raid 0 and I have no idea what had been done with it at all. I have no set it up properly myself this time from scratch and am having no problems with it now.

So the point that im trying to make is i feel totally let down that after paying extra to have these services included, I find after a while (and after calling systems support who insisted nothing was wrong), that the system was set up poorly and not even to the specifications requested.

Once again I repeat that I should have dug deeper but I followed the advice provided by Ocuk. I just basically want Ocuk to provide the standard of quality that they advertise.

The Halk · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:26

Hmm.

When Windows 7 was installed it often sticks a 100MB partition on another drive and uses this to boot from. That's likely what happened with you. There are ways to fix it (as I recall) if the other drive is removed.

As for the 2 WD RE3 not being in RAID0 - how do you know? If you have no idea what had been done with it, then you don't seem to be au fait with RAID. In that case how do you know it wasn't in RAID0?

Odin · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:27

As I went into the bios and went into the intel raid bios screen it confirmed that the drives were not set up in any raid format. I attempted to sort out the issues with the boot info but the 1tb drive was faulty and Windows 7 would not repair anything as it kept having issues with this raw drive.

Buchanan0204 · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:31

Hard lines. Just goes to show you should always do it yourself

I realise this doesn't help your situation, maybe be worth sending a webnote, see what they can do for you. Maybe throw a few case fans your way

The Halk · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:31

How big was this raw drive that you saw, and where did you see it?

The repair is done using Windows boot media, it may be able to do it by itself, or you may need to do a fixboot /mbr or some command similar - I've done it years ago and not since.

Odin · 28 Jan 2011 at 12:37

The raw drive was also 250Gb. It would show everywhere (bios, windows setup, windows bootmedia, windows, disk management etc ) but I could do nothing with it at all. I tried the fixboot /mbr system followed by a startup repair but the log would still issue complaints about this drive.

The Halk · 28 Jan 2011 at 14:28

That's certainly strange Odin. Since you've now fixed it we'll never be able to pin down exactly what it was. I've used RAID a number of times over the years and when it goes wrong it can produce strange results.

It's possible that OcUK set up one of the two drives as non member RAID, and left the other as unparitioned space... The problem with that is that you would have noticed only having half the space you should have had on the array.