I have set up RAID sets of various types of motherboards many times in
the past and have had NO significant problems but this time I am
experiencing VERY severe problems with this model of ASUS motherboard.
I have a quantity of 10 identical boards, each has 3 gigabytes of
memory, an Athlon XP 3000+ processor, ATI 9800 All in Wonder video card
AND for hard drives each has two identical IBM, now HITACHI,
HDS722525VLSA80 Serial ATA hard drives, these are 250 GB serial ATA
drives with 8 megabytes of cache. I noticed some very difficult
problems while attempting to set up my first system. I checked to see
if the same problems existed on two other boards and they all turned
out to have the same problems. I am NOT going to bother to check all 7
other boards, I assume that the problem is the same with each one.
I am going to make this discussion extremely clear with eacting
references to what is in the motherboard reference manual and the EXACT
messages that I see on the screen when I attempt to follow steps.
On this particular model of board when you want to have RAID 0 or RAID
1 you must enable the Serial ATA jumper as noted in Section 2.6.6 on
page 2-17 of the motherbaord manual. Failure to take this step will
not allow the Silicon Image 3112 controller chip to be active. This
step is completed properly.
Next, when you boot up, you will see the following message on the
screen:
SiI 3112A SATARaid BIOS Version 4.2.47
Copyright (C) 1997-2004 Silicon Image, Inc.
Press <Ctrl S> or F4 to enter RAID utility
When I press either Ctrl S or F4 REPEATEDLY this does NOT allow me to
enter the RAID Configuration Utility except for 1 out of approximately
10 boot up attempts. On the one out of 10 times that I am able to
enter the RAID Configuration Utility, the RAID Configuration Utility
does not recognize the presence of the two drives that are present.
Only one drive is recognized as being present. Creating a RAID Set
does not work because only one drive is recognized as being present and
if you select Resolve Conflicts you get the message that there are not
any conflicts. I do not know why the RAID Configuration Utility (see
Section 5.5.2 on page 5-14 of the motherboard manual) does NOT seem to
work as shown or work in a way that I KNOW it should work.
I know that each one of these drives and the associated cables and
power supply (fancy model from PC Power and Cooling) are working
perfectly since I have tested them on other working systems. What I do
not know yet is whether or not there is some inherent problem with
IBM/Hitachi drives or whether or not this drive size is too large for
this RAID controller chip or what. The system does recognize the one
drive properly. I have not had a chance to use a smaller size in GB
IBM/Hitachi matched pair or a matched pair of drives from another
manufacturer such as Seagate. I do not use Maxtor drives and I
DEFINITELY do NOT use Western Digital drives.
If I attempt to load Windows XP Professional SP2 on the 1 SATA drive
that is recognized I can do this by pressing S and having a setup disk
in the floppy drive that has drivers for the Silicon Image 3112
controller chip. Windows XP Professional sees the 2 drives as separate
drives and you can format each one individually but each one is separate
and you can load the operating system on only one drive and the Windows
XP does not see the two drives as one drive with an approximate size of
500 gigabytes. The installation has never completed properly after
multiple tweakings. After the installation thinks that it is complete
(but it never completed properly) I CANNOT boot from the drive onto
which I installed the operating system.
Here is what the screen looks like:
Windows XP Professional Setup
The following list shows the existing partitions and unpartitioned
space on this computer.
Use the UP and Down ARROW keys to select an item in the list.
*To set up Windows XP on the selected item, press ENTER.
*To create a partition in the unpartitioned space, press C.
*To delete the selected partition, press D.
239367 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on si3112r [MBR]
C: Partition1 [NTFS] 239359 MB (239287 MB free)
Unpartitioned space 8 MB
239367 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 1 on si3112r [MBR]
D: Partition1 [NTFS] 239359 MB (239287 MB free)
Unpartitioned space 8 MB
If I leave the 2 SATA drives alone and place an IDE drive on the
primary IDE drive controller and load the operating system on the IDE
drive after I load all appropriate drivers I can see the 2 separate
SATA drives and I can load programs and data on them and I can
partition them and do whatever I want with them, BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT I
WANT TO DO WITH THESE 10 SYSTEMS. I want the operating system, all
programs and all data to appear on the 2 SATA drives as a STRIPED RAID
set.
I am sending a copy of this discussion of problems to both ASUS and
Silicon Image.
If there is anyone out there who has some information about what is
going on with this particular model of board and the problems that I am
facing I would like to hear about it. I want to know if this is a
defective product that I cannot get to work properly no matter what I
do. I DO NOT want to have to spend 10 hours of my time looking at the
BIOS only to independently determine that there is some insurrmountable
problem that will keep me from having a FUNCTIONAL STRIPED RAID SET.
--
Chris PLACAK
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