finding physical unit for disk in Windows

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mikeblas

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - May 2006
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I'm building a machine and I have (among others), five external 300 GB SAS drives. Using the hardware RAID card, I've built two of the five into a RAID1 pair, and I'm using the other three as individual drives.

In Windows, I'd like to know which disk is the RAID1 pair. I can't find a way to associate the physical drives, or the logical unit produced by the RAID configuration utility, with the disk number that Windows will configure.

Code: 
DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          279 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online         1117 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online          279 GB      0 B
  Disk 3    Online          279 GB   279 GB
  Disk 4    Online          279 GB   279 GB
  Disk 5    Online          279 GB   279 GB
  Disk 6    Online          279 GB   279 GB
  Disk 7    Online          477 GB      0 B

Disk 3, Disk 4, Disk 5, or Disk 6, could be my RAID1 volume; and the other three are the RAID0 volumes. How do I know which is which?

I happen to know that Disk0 isn't involved in the set of 5, as it's another RAID1 volume that I built before installing the OS.
 
how many actual physical disks do you have, and what size are they? i want to tell between actual physical disks, and logical disks (raid arrays) that the diskpart is seeing there.

from that code text, you have six 300GB drives...? with no other info, i would assume the two that say zero bytes free were the disks in the RAID1 simply because they are different from the rest.

generally, assuming all your SATA connections are populated in order starting from 1 (though different hardware does this different ways) the motherboard SATA port 1 = disk 0, port 2= disk 1, etc. usually ports on an expander/SAS card, and logical (raid) disks, would be added at the end of the list.

unless you have a better way of doing it, unplug one drive, boot into the raid controllers boot rom and see which disk was removed, label that disk. repeat until you have labeled them all. do not boot into windows while doing this, as windows RAID is not the most robust, and can do strange unpredictable things, like write to disks when it shouldnt, which is bad. as long as you dont modify (ie: write) to a drive on a broken array, you shouldnt damage the entire array permanently.

you can also try typing "detail disk" into diskpart which should list the details, hopefully including serial number/names, like you would see in BIOS. then you should be able to match them from the MFG labels on the disks themselves.
 
Physical: 16 x 300 GB, 32 x 147 GB

Logical: RAID1 (2x300GB), JBOD (4x300GB), RAID10 (8x300GB), RAID1 (2x300GB)

The 147 gig drives weren't configured, so no logical drives there yet.

The drives here showing 0GB are not RAID1. They're showing 0GB free because they weren't yet formatted.
 
According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415 diskpart can show the detail of disks with the detail disk command. Not sure that gives you exactly what you want but dispart may well be enhanced in later Windows. Are you limited to the CLI? The disk management MMC gives you the volume number and the properties command would show you the hardware.
 
"detail disk", actually, nitro.

That gets me some information about the disk:

Code: 
DISKPART> detail disk

HP LOGICAL VOLUME SCSI Disk Device
Disk ID: 8808CEC1
Type   : RAID
Status : Online
Path   : 0
Target : 6
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0600)#PCI(0000)#RAID(P00T06L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 3     T   MyDisk       NTFS   Partition    279 GB  Healthy

but there's still nothing that I can match it to in the RAID disk configuration tool. I'm still looking, because it seems like path/target/LUN would be enough. But I don't see that anywhere in the UI.
 
I ended up working around this by disabling the disks in the RAID configuration software, watching which disk disappeared from the Windows tool. It seems like there must be a better way, but in the end I guess it doesn't matter since this doesn't actually cause downtime.
 
So you were using FakeRAID?

I thought you were using windows raid:confused:
 
What is "FakeRAID"? I'm using an HP p410i adapter.
 
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