LXr8500 Physical Disks Don't Appear in NetRAID

[Simon Hartley]

Hi

I have an LXr8500 with 2 x 18.2GB disks in that I am trying/failing to configure and I am out of my depth technically. The disks show up on the Symbios Utility (Ctrl-C) but I cannot configure them here. They do not show up on the NetRAID utility (Ctrl-M) where I would expect them to appear.

Am I being stupid? Is there a way to create logical disks in the Symbios utility? Is the NetRAID utility totally irrelevant to this issue? Should I use the HP Navigator CD to configure the disks?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[CA660377 · Accepted solution]

it sppears you have the cable running from the HDD cage to the Symbios SCSI controller, and not the netraid controller. the Symbios controller is just a plain SCSI controller, and does not support arrays on a hardware level. follow the cable from the HDD cage and make sure it leads to the netraid adapter.

[Dave Unverhau_1]

Simon,

To expand on Theo's reply, the onboard Symbios SCSI controller has no RAID functionality built-in. In order to configure RAID logical drives, you'll need to cable them to the Netraid card. Once you do, you should be able to see them in the Netraid utility.

Regards,

Dave

[Simon Hartley]

Many thanks guys, you were absolutely right, I now have a mirrored volume and everything is right in the world.

[George Peters]

One thing to note, so that you know other options down the road is that the way you had your cables configured would work on systems that support SISL (SCSI Interrupt Steering Logic).

Some motherboards (I think they've dropped the SISL design for a different one) would allow you to place a "zero-channel" raid controller (ie: Mylex Acceleraid 200) and it would use the onboard SCSI ports as the pathway to the drives. So the cables were still connected to the on-board scsi ports, but the RAID controller would basically intercept and communicate activity to the drives. I have an older SC450NX Quad Xeon server that supports this. It's not the best design because it would take two trips across the MB bus for each transaction.

Just FYI.

George