Drives >137gb Not Mirroring properly...

[Hoss]

Greetings...
W2K SP3 + latest patches + EnableBigLBA key is set in registry
Adaptec 1200A IDE Raid card
2 identical Western Digital 160gb 7200RPM 8mb cache drives

I have drive 1 and drive 2 on the adaptec IDE card (drive 1 is primary
channel master, drive 2 is secondary channel master)

First, I formatted drive 1 as one NTFS partition; it works fantastic.
Second, I tried to configure a mirroring relationship between the 2
identical 160gb drives. It regenerates and eventually dies with a disk
I/O error. Event log shows:
The device, \Device\Scsi\ata1200a1 did not respond within the timeout
period.
If I mirror the drives at the hardware level, using Adaptec's software to
configure
it, everything works -fine-. But mirroring via W2K never seems to finish
properly. So, I know the drives -work- ok, but the trick is getting W2K to
do it
properly.

I contacted Adaptec, and they said it might be an issue w/ processor
overhead.
(but, that'd I'd need to contact MS).

So, does anybody have any bright ideas?

Thanks for any insight-
hoss

 

[Chris Knapp]

Try this: RAID the drives in hardware as 1 x 160 GB mirrored volume. Then
partition the "drive" into 2 x 80GB partitions in W2K. Then span the 2
partitions. I had a similar problem with an HP IDE RAID controller.