Raid Controller or Vista-Who's right?

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superkdogg

Gawd
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Oct 14, 2004
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I recently got a new laptop (well for me at least). It's an Everest xt5000t. The laptop has two hdd bays and comes with a 5400 RPM 100 GB hard drive.

This is not a thread about the benefits of raid 0 or lack thereof, but I went on eBay and bought a second HDD that was supposed to be 5400 RPM and 100 GB as well. When it arrived I see it's a 7200 RPM drive, but using the logic that it won't matter because essentially some extra speed will be wasted but the raid array will functionally operate like striped 5400 rpm drives I decided to push forward.

I got the bios flashed (always fun when OS based flashes don't want to work and you don't have a USB floppy) and created the array. The raid controller is the onboard nVidia one.

The raid controller says its a 186 GB striped drive with a stripe size of 2 and width of 128 (all of this is correct).

I then pop in the lappy's recovery cd and install Vista. That's where it gets interesting.

I notice in Vista two things that are interesting to me:

1. Vista does not report the array as one drive. It says there is a 93 GB Fujitsu drive and a 93 GB Seagate drive and assigns them the letters C and D.

2. The Fujitsu drive is 5400 RPM with NCQ and the Seagate is 7200 but no NCQ.


I then reboot and figure that Vista will see the array properly this time. NOPE. Same as above-two drives, exactly like it would be if there were no raid array at all, but the onboard raid is still reporting a striped array with the proper parameters.

So my question is basically which one is right? Did the Vista install disk possibly create two partitions on my array in the background? Did Vista somehow take down the array and make it two seperate drives even though the raid bios says it's a striped array? Is the raid controller just not working right? Does the different RPMs/NCQ support affect this somehow?

Thanks for the help in advance
 
is there any kind of raid driver you need to install for this before proceeding with vista install like the f6 option for xp?
 
I did install the raid driver for Vista after the install, but since the array was in place before the OS installation I should have either gotten an error message that the OS didn't have a valid partition to install to or it should have worked correctly unless I'm missing something.

Maybe I need to set up the array and then fdisk and format it before doing the OS install? That would make sense.....this thread may be half-baked.
 
Well, bad news and good news. First, I'm not an idiot and did not imagine this whole thing.

I destroyed the array (changed it to no RAID), then rebuilt a new striped array. Then ran FDISK, creating one big partition. Then formatted and confirmed that I had one 186 GB partition and it was set active.

At that point I popped in the restore disk and let it go to work. First boot into Vista, I have 2 drives listed! I right click on properties and then hardware, and it says that the location of the D drive is.....nVidia RAID controller.

The whole problem was that the restore disk doesn't look at whatever is on the drives before it goes to work. It simply creates a 91 GB partition (leaving 4 GB inactive) and installs to it. Then it evidently did the exact same thing on the other drive, but did not install anything there. Weird.
 
I should add that I know now that the raid is functioning, too. I got a Windoze Experience score of 5.7 on the HDD, which is way higher than the 4.4-4.5 that the stock HDD would give and shows that the array is working.
 
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