Spanned drives in LH3

[William Harrington_1]

I don't to be able to use the Windows2003 disc manager to span the drives in cage #2. The option to span the RAID 0 drives in cage #2 just isn't offered, it just has primary and extended, no logical. The logical drive in cage #1 does not offer to include the drives in cage # 2. I thought I could earlier, but perhaps not.
Should I be able to span these drives and do I have a hardware problem?

[e4services]

First off, you speak of using Win2003 to create a drive mirror, but then you speak of RAID, but then again you speak of Primary and extended partitions.
The RAID controller in your LH3 deals with the logical drives created from disks in the hot swap cage.
Windows Disk Manager deals withs those logical drives, after they are created, as if they were new disks.

Please explain what you had, what you now have and what you want.

[Sean T. Craig · Accepted solution]

William,

e4 is right. Nobody likes to answer a question with another question. If your drives are part of a hardware RAID, then Windows doesn't know anything about it. It thinks that a hardware logical drive is really just one physical drive. Check if there is a prompt to enter the NetRAID Express Tools Utility by pressing M when the server is POSTing. If so, go into Objects --> Physical Drive and write down everything you see. Then go back to Objects and choose Logical drive. Write down everything you see. Post your findings here and we'll tell you the best way to proceed.

Good luck,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[William Harrington_1]

Thanks for the replies, I don't mind questions. I currently have the drives set as RAID 1 and 5 so I can't give the exact detail and will have to go on memory. Let me expand on the question.

I'm attempting to use The Windows disc manager to span phsical drives that exist in cage 1 and cage 2 of the LH3 server.

This is a known, if I create a RAID5 array using the ctrl+M disc manager a striped array can be created that could include all or some the drives in cage 1 and 2 without any problems.

I have two drives mirrored as RAID1 in cage 1 and have the OS Windows2003 installed on those mirrored drives.

There are two more drives in cage 1 and four drives in cage 2. These are the 1.6" thick drives so four will fill the entire cage. These drives could be configured as RAID 5 but RAID 5 loses one drive's worth of space to parity and I would prefer to have the total drive space available. The data being stored on these drives is from back up tape testing so it is not important is the drives fail and data is lost. So each of those six drives is configured as RAID 0 and stands alone.

After the OS boots up and one goes into the WINDOWS disc manager the C: drive shows as active and healthy and the others show as unallocated.

Starting with the first unallocated drive, which is in cage 1 of course, when configuring and activating this drive the option to create a spanned drive is offered and when viewing the drives that may be spanned only the two unallocated drives in cage 1 are available. The four drives in cage two are not included in the left hand panel for selection.

I find it odd that Windows can not span all six drives.

My revised question is;

Do you find that odd?

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi William,

From what I see, it looks like the six drives (not the O/S Drives) are each their own RAID-0 drive, thus Disk Management shows 6 drives with unallocated space. Is this correct? If so, you best bet, being that you don't want to lose any capacity, is to configure all 6 drives into a single RAID-0 array, instead of 6 RAID-0's spanned together. The easy way to do this is using the NetRAID Assistant utility found at this link:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=15389&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=50440&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1005
You can use the utility to delete the 6 RAID-0 drives and then run the Configuration Wizard to create a single RAID-0 drive using all 6.

Let us know how it goes,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[William Harrington_1]

Thanks,
Yes, you are absolutely correct Sean, that is what I wanted to do. It still seems odd that it couldn't be done by Windows but if you don't feel there's a hardware issue I can certainly live with that.
I was overlooking the option to set the drives as RAID 0 rather RAID 5, I just accepted RAID 5 as the only RAID available.

There are several utilities on that linked page, is the "HP Instant Top Tool" the one you were suggesting I use?

Regards,
Bill

[Sean T. Craig]

The one you're looking for is labeled:
Utility for HP NetRAID-1M, HP-NetRAID-2M, NetRAID-3Si, NetRAID-1Si, and Integrated NetRAID(Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows N
and the version is B.02.03

Download the executable and run it. It will extract all the setup files to your hard drive. Then go into the folder that was created and run Setup.exe. Choose the option that says "Manage Adapters in this server only"

You don't need to restart at the end when it tells you to, the script was written for Windows NT which does require the reboot.
When you run the utility, choose "Full Access".

The Logical Devices section of the interface shows you your logical drives. You can select the last one in the list and right-click --> delete. Keep doing this with the last logical drive in the list until all you have left is your O/S array.

Now you get to create your new array:
1. Click on the configuration wizard and choose "Custom" --> next
2. Click on each of the 6 drives to highlight them, click "Add to Array", click "Accept Array", click "Next"
3. Change your RAID level to RAID-0, click "Accept", click "Next".
4. Click "Finish" then accept all the OK's and say "OK" to initialize.
5. When it's done, restart the server and Disk Management should show 1 disk the size of all 6 in an unallocated state.
6. Partition and format as required
7. Come back to ITRC and POST how well it worked.

Good luck,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[William Harrington_1]

I did install the utility and following your instructions it worked as it should. I doubt that I could winged it without your instruction. This utility must be the fore runner to the PERC3 type controller software seen on newer machines.
It appears that the drive must be initialized after being setup with this utiiity whereas drives created at the hardware level do not always require the initialization.

This seems to prove that there is not a hardware problem in controlling the drives even though the Windows2003 disk manager had some difficulty.

Thanks for your time, effort and excellant instructions.

[William Harrington_1]

Thanks for your help.