ML110 G4 boot device problem

[Alex Evans]

I'm trying to set the internal SATA raid as the 1st boot device but seem to be having a problem. We have an internal raid sata PCI card with a drive attached to it which isn't raid and isn't to be used as the boot device. In the bios for boot order there are 2 listings under hard drive, the raid and the bootable add-in card. I have set the raid before the add-in card and set hard drives as the first device. Normally this should work but the system will not boot and does not display an error when the drive is plugged into the add-in card. Just a flashing dash appears in the top left corner after going through the post checks just before you would normally see the windows loading screen. If the drive is removed and only the raid is present then it boots with no problems. I have also gone into the raid config and made the raid 1 bootable. This could be a problem for us in the future when restarting the server unattended. Can anyone help?

[RufusG]

I installed a hardware RAID Controller and added 2 extra disks to create a RAID-1 data store that is fail-safe.

I only put the Operating System on to the original single disk.

I only put Data on to the RAID drive.

There are 4 advantages to this:

1. The hardware RAID drive starts the moment the power is on and is virtually independent of the rest of the computer. It has excellent RAID Array Manager software.

2. You could move the RAID disks and Controller card to another computer in minutes

3. The Windows Swap File and the Data are on 2 separate drives, so the overall system performance is improved.

4. You can rebuild and upgrade the Operating System or re-format the original single disk without disturbing your Data.

I have working Data on my workstation and I have a backup utility to copy complete files and folders over to the RAID-1 drive on the server as they change.

- Belt & Braces
- LOCKS ( Lots of Copies Keep Safe )

This way I am storing personal Data and family photographs going back to 1984.

Not a very expensive solution and it is very very effective.

Hope that this helps you

[RufusG]

This is slightly off topic but, as supplied, the ML110 ( G2, G3 & G4 ) have only a single DIMM memory module installed.

This reduces the CPU-memory performance by half and reduces the overall system performance by 10-25%

If you install matched pairs of DIMMs - in the correct sockets - you will improve the performance of the complete system.

See the attached document for more details

Click on the paperclip in the top right of this message to read it.

[Alex Evans]

No this doesn't really help. Dual memory modules are installed. This problem would normally not be an issue. Most bios should prioritise bootable devices and if windows is on the first device then it shouldn't check the others. This isn't happening in my case and i have the latest bios installed.