Bad axe 2 raid controllers

J

jcazes

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 10, 2007
Messages
290
I just got 3 500 giggers from the fry's maxtor sale, tried to install them yesterday and was unsuccessful.

My goal is to put them in RAID 5 on my blue SATA ports (Marvell controller, for those without a bad axe 2). Before I installed them, I updated to the latest Marvell drivers from Intel's site. I then hooked them up to all 3 blue sata ports (3/4 of my Matrix black ports are used up with 2 non-RAID 400gb and my 74gb boot drive). I then booted up, and all three 500gb drives were detected by the marvell raid controller--at this point, I didn't want to put them in raid yet, so I just let windows continue. However, after the Marvell screen went away, a blinking cursor showed up and I couldn't go anywhere from there (except reboot).

If I disabled the secondary SATA controller in the bios then I can boot up fine (but of course I can't use those 3 500gb drives). If I put them in RAID 0, I still get the blinking cursor. On top of that, RAID 5 isn't even an option if I try to put them in an array...

Anybody have any ideas?
 
maybe try building a RAID5 off the ICH7, using 3 drives in RAID plus your boot drive. then put your extra 400's on the marvell controller as just drives.

i have a lot of experience with the bad axe series of boards, but i always disable the marvell and SIL controllers. the intel matrix raid seems to be a very nice system for and integrated solution. i'm just guessing here - but i would have preference of using the ICH RAID controlller for raid 5 instead of the marvell.
 
The problem is, I can't even get the system to boot with the 3 500gb drives NOT in raid (as I didn't configure a raid when I first attempted to boot up with them), so it seems as if switching the sets would yield the same results as I'm getting now (blinking cursor after marvell screen and nothing else).
 
Did you make sure that the BIOS was set to boot from the proper disk after you plugged in the new drives?
 
yup, the 74gb raptor is number 1 priority after reboot but still the blinking cursor of doom :(
 
A couple of updates... I spoke with Intel support, and apparently the Marvell controller can only do RAID 0 and 1, so I switched the drives over to the matrix controller. I successfully put them in RAID 5, but my system doesn't detect them in XP, which I assume is b/c of the F6 drivers during install... I created the RAID, but right after the matrix RAID screen, I get some messages about Intel Boot loader (although I don't see anything about this in my boot configs).

I'm currently trying to figure out what this boot loader issue is, and if I can manage to update the Matrix drivers w/o reinstalling (device manager says RAID controller drivers need updating but I can't find a non-floppy version of the drivers).
 
more updates.... the boot loader message went away after I installed the intel matrix storage manager, which properly shows my initialized RAID 5 array, but it WON'T SHOW UP IN XP #$!#$%!#$%/ (neither diskmgmt nor my computer).

Will try to troubleshoot some more after work :(
 
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