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Fix for disappearing RAID configurations in 8890

post #1 of 3
3/25/05 at 2:53am
Thread Starter 
Hi fellow 8890 owners,
I finally have a fix for the problem of the RAID configuraiton sometimes dropping out at random.

Solution: You must have BOTH disks set to MASTER, not cable select, not slave. This is particularly the problem with the second disk located at the left rear of the laptop (ie. under the ESC key). To set the disks to master REMOVE the small jumper across the two pins to the right of the cable connector. See below:



Configuration: 8890 configured to use two disks in RAID 0 (stripe).

Symptoms: At random the system will fail to boot with messages such as "operating system not found" "unable to find disks" "array not functional" etc etc.

Diagnostics: On boot the Fasttrak RAID configuation splash screen says the array is not functional. Entering <Ctrl>F to view drive assignments shows this - the first disk is "Free" . Not good...



Of course it should look like this:



And your boot screen should look like this if all is well:



Solution: make sure both disks are set to MASTER by removing the jumper both disk drives (in particular the disk located near the left rear of the laptop (ie. under the ESC key).
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post #2 of 3
3/25/05 at 3:01am
Thread Starter 
As an aside to this, this fix also solves a problem if you reload windows and want to partition your disk to allow for a Linux partition. Without this fix the full NTFS format (as against a quick format - that seems to work) done by WinXP during a clean install fails just after the format completes, complaining about the disk not being available. At that point the reinstall fails and you are left with the RAID array offline and showing one of the disks as "Free".

By making both disks MASTERS (normally the disk under the battery is always set to master) the full NTFS format with a smaller partition for WinXP works and you can have your Linux partition ready to load later on.

This also works when you use Windows Automated System Restore (ASR) to recover your system from a fatal crash and/or do a bare metal restore or clone onto another laptop. (ASR does a full NTFS format and if the disk is partitioned without the fix the restore will fail). Bottom line make both disks MASTER and even ASR will work
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post #3 of 3
3/25/05 at 8:48am
Thread Starter 
One piece of info that will save someone's time and frustration:
If you do a bare metal restore due to a disk upgrade or replacement of a disk in the RAID array you MUST do a full NTFS reformat using the Windows XP CD in install mode - not ASR mode.

For some strange reason the new unformatted disks will still cause the RAID array to fail if you try to format them using the ASR recovery mode. If you format them first as though you are going to do a normal Windows install the format works as described in the previous posts. You will need to stop the normal Windows install when it asks you for the RAID driver floppy for the second time after the format completes. Then you can go back, restart the laptop and enter ASR mode, allow the full ASR format to proceed and it then works. Serious amount of time wastage though. A 120GB (effective 114GB) RAID array using twin 7k60's takes 30 minutes. Double that because you have to do it twice and you are up for just over an hour before you can even begin to reload your data. If you have larger (100GB disks) in the RAID array you will be waiting even longer.
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