31 replies to this topic

[Mando]

Tony., on 19 January 2013 - 21:36, said:

Go into Disk Manager and see if they are there, they might be 'offline' or need a drive letter assigning to the array.



People don't really need to do this, he could of easily just left the driver part out of it and installed Windows 8 to the new SSD then installed the drivers. As long as he isn't booting off the RAID array itself, it's fine. You only need to install the drivers during setup if your going to install to the array itself.

Sorry should have been a bit more precise, I didn't mean in windows install start up, I meant if he had controller disabled in bios before installing W8. Once W8 was fully installed and he rebooted n enabled it.
I personally would have left it all enabled and let W8 setup see it in initial install time, what I always do on my own rig and exactly what I do with LUN mapped drives on SAN arrays presented as RAID volumes on rebuilds of servers. Never been an issue yet.

the raid config data is held and owned by the controller, same with the volumes in the raid container, windows will read it form that and not mess it up.

[WA7ER]

Indeed, I didn't install any drivers during Win 8 installation, allowed it to do it's regular thing seeing as I only had the one drive enabled.

I have the latest Intel RAID drivers installed, and also the latest Marvell SASA controller drivers, I'm a bit perplexed as to why it's not just appearing as I had anticipated!

(This is my first build using RAID in case you couldn't guess )

[+PeterUK]

On boot up you should see the array listed yes?

[WA7ER]

Indeed, in BIOS I see the 5 separate individual drives, in Intel RST I see the complete array, is there another time during boot I should see the array listed?

Here are the only two screens I see during the actual boot process:
http://i.imgur.com/OxysUeV.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ySBdKxW.jpg

[+PeterUK]

Its got to be in windows Disk Management maybe you didn't scroll down to see it?

[WA7ER]

Nope, it's absolutely not there, there's no mention of it anywhere within Windows as far as I can see...

Very frustrating as I can't see a logical reason why it wouldn't be!

[+BudMan]

"Unplugged all drives.
Installed Win 8 with just the SSD connected"

So you booted the computer and powered on the array controller with ALL the drives unplugged - don't you think the array controller might notice that it booted up and all its disk were offline? I am quite sure it would mark them OFFLINE when that happens, and your array is not valid any longer.

Now you should be able to go into the controller and get them back online again.. But there would of been no freaking reason to unplug them in the first place.. You might do that with single drives if you your not sure you could tell which one is which on an install. But I would be pretty sure you could tell the difference between a SSD and a raid 5 array to which one you wanted to install too.

Good luck - its quite possible you blew up the array when you unplug all its drive and then boot the controller -- what do you think its going to think happened to its disks??

[tim_s]

I doubt it blew up lol - you might of meant this as a dramatic way of saying uninitialized. It can take quite some time for the re-initialization process to complete. If I pull a hot swappable disk on one of the older units - it could take up to 3 hours before the new one is back online. A flashing light indicates the drives status.

[+articuno1au]

The controller should be able to re-init off of the disks based on the fact it's identified them as being disk members.

It ought just read the damn thing in theory. I've done it before with Intel controllers.

At the very worst it might require a resync.

[WA7ER]

Judging by the image I took of Intel RST it still recognizes all the drives as being a valid array, why would having them unplugged cause any damage?
How would I go about with resyncing? I feel somewhat out of my depth here!

[WA7ER]

Sorted!
Thanks everyone for your help

[+articuno1au]

Thank **** for that D:

I was worried I'd buggered up D:

What was the answer in the end?

[WA7ER]

Sorry, it ended up being remarkably simple:

I used the Intel RST CLI, ran the get info command, saw that the array was recognised, ran the flush cache command, restarted, and voila

[+BudMan]

Good thing you didn't do "re-initialization" - that wipes the disks clean

I'm not sure the details of your controller - not sure what a flush cache command does on this specific controller. But if disk is seen offline, normally you would have to force it back online when it was seen again.

Glad you got it sorted. In the future - the only reason you would disconnect disks when installing, if you want to make sure you know which one your installing too because say you have 2 disks of the same size or maker, etc. Windows is not going to just pick some disk to install the boot or system too.. Its going to use the one you say to use. While I agree with the nature of the suggestion of removing the other drives during install -- you have to be careful in a case where controller of an array might think its drives died when it turns on and does not seem them

[+PeterUK]

BudMan, on 20 January 2013 - 14:05, said:

Good thing you didn't do "re-initialization" - that wipes the disks clean

If done right it does not wipe the disks as I show for recovering a RAID at the end.
http://communities.i...m/docs/DOC-6004