Moved to WS 2012E w/FlexRAID. 3TB issues.

haxxorboi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
159
Hey guys,

I had a WHS 2011 system running with FlexRAID (Snapshot+Pool). I recently had some drives start to go, so I preemptively traded them out for 3TB WD Reds. I got everything back up and running, and then decided I wanted to migrate to Server 2012 Essentials (instead of reinstalling WHS 2011 in a while due to some issues I was having and just wanted to clean install it). BUT, I ran into a few issues that I'm hoping you guys know about.

I broke my RAID1 (thus I still have my WHS2011 install on the disconnected mirror SSD) and installed WS2012E. After all the drivers for my AOC-SASLP-MV8, all my drives appear in Disk Management. The issue is that the 3TB drives are showing up as two separate partitions: one 2048GB "Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)" and one 746.52GB Unallocated partition. These were initialized with GPT as a single 3TB partition on WHS2011 and were detecting fine. I connected one of the drives to through an external dock to my laptop (over USB) and it says it wants to initialize the disk (either on GPT or MBR).

I'm not really sure what is going on here. Same hardware, just a different OS. The whole drive detects, it just isn't as it was before and I can't see any of the data. I'm obviously hesitant to wipe the drives and format as a 3TB GPT partition again as I'll lose all the data I saved from the dying drives.

Any idea WTH is going on here? I've never seen this happen before, but then again this is my first time dealing with 3TB drives.
 
Have you updated the firmware on the AOC-SASLP-MV8? There is newer FW that will let you use greater than 2TB drives.
 
Have you updated the firmware on the AOC-SASLP-MV8? There is newer FW that will let you use greater than 2TB drives.

I had all four Reds connected to the onboard SATA controller (which is running in RAID mode with the broken RAID1, they're obviously not in the RAID). The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2, which has AMD 740G + SB710 Chipset. This was working fine with WHS2011.

I just found the v4 driver for Windows, so now I can boot the Reds from the SASLP, but they are still showing up as the two partitions, not mountable. I believe the firmware is the latest (3.0.1.21 or something like that).
 
I upgraded the drivers for the SB7xx chipset from AMD to the latest, but still no dice. I plugged in my WHS2011 SSD and checked to make sure all the Reds still detect correctly; they do. All four drives show up as single 2.73TB partitions. And I wasn't running the v4 driver for the SASLP either (but I never ran the Reds on those lanes so I wouldn't never seen the boot loop issues that v4 apparently fixed). The driver for the SB7xx chipset is from 2009 and supports 3TB fine, so I'm confused why the 2013 driver is having an issue.

Maybe it's not being happy with Win8 code (I'm pretty sure 2012E is based on the same Win8 code vs WHS2011 which I think was Win7 code). That's really the only thing I can think of. I'm moving the data off them so I can do a reformat in 2012E if necessary to make the single partitions, but I'd still like to know WTH is going on here.

Thoughts?
 
Here is a similar situation:
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/26194-3tb-hdd-strange-issue/
 
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