NV Pain

[Groltz]

Has anyone in here had the horrifyingly nasty experience of trying to create a bootable SATA Raid-0 array on a Nforce4 board with an integrated NV Raid controller?

I'll elaborate if there's any 'yes' votes.

 

[Groltz]

Almost a religious experience here at the Groltz household...

After fighting with the aforementioned scenario for the last 2 days the machine just booted to the desktop.

Bartender, drinks on me...at least until something else fubars on this work-in-progress.

 

[time]

Yes. The first time I tried nForce 4 RAID, it was with an Asus board and I initially had problems. It was fine after that initial entanglement, though.

Recently, I tried it on a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 and had no problems whatsover. I installed the OS onto one drive, then enabled RAID in the BIOS, created a RAID 1 array in the RAID setup (F10), booted up and all was fine (it started building in the background).

Later, I changed the RAID configuration to RAID 0, and the nVidia driver handled it all transparently with no loss of data. I was impressed - pity it's no use under Linux.

 

[Bartender]

Bartender, drinks on me...at least until something else fubars on this work-in-progress.

:wink:

 

[tazwegion]

Oh... in that case, I'll have a double then thanks

 

[Buck]

Just as a note Steve, I usually end up disabling the NV RAID feature. When disabled, the SATA drives show up during POST. Anyway, this can also become a problem, as I've had the BIOS inadvertantly drop back to default settings (how, I don't know, but it caused a few service calls), which enables the NV RAID feature. When this happens, Windows doesn't boot, because no boot devices are found. Once I go into the BIOS and disable this feature again, everything works normally. :roll:

 

[Groltz]

Although it took a while, I finally was able to determine that it was the NV-raid drivers causing the havoc. For some strange reason, the newest set along with the last 2-3 iterations before them, simply will not work. Finally using an older v5.18 set worked just great.

The real pisser in all this is the amount of time it took to get it figured out. I couldn't find any specific reference of this problem by googling around the net, etc. To find out if a given nv-raid driver set worked or not entailed installing WinXp onto the empty array with the installation of the nv-raid drivers accomplished via F6 and a floppy...Then waiting out the entire installation process and seeing if it would boot to the desktop in the end. With the non-compatible drivers I would get endless BSODs when the machine tried to boot into windows the very first time. Very frustrating. I had also tried slipstreaming the NV-raid drivers onto the XP cd using nlite. This wasn't any better (with the newer drivers, that is, I made a total of 3 XP slipstreams with different drivers sets, none of which were the usable v5.18's it turns out)

Anyway, it's finally working. Thanks for the input, Buck.

Cheers,
-steve

 

[time]

I've never bothered with installing the nVidia drivers while installing Windows (F6), so for all I know, that may be completely broken (it obviously was for you).

For everyone's future reference, you do *not* need to slipstream drivers with nForce 3 or nForce 4 motherboards. This applies to Win2k, WinXP and Win64. Installing the nForce 4 integrated driver package afterwards works just fine.

Buck, how are you disabling RAID in the BIOS?

 

[Groltz]

Right on the slipstreaming David. However, if you are going to make a RAID array on these boards the RAID drivers either have to be F6'ed in during the beginning of the Win-OS install or slipstreamed onto the CD as a textmode driver using OEM Preinstall. I do slipstreams because I've had good luck making them using nLite. The last XP32 disk I made had almost all my needed drivers inserted into it plus RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack, plus Windows Media Player 10 and a lot of tweaks all burned together. Those NV-Raid drivers were causing me grief before I got the version anomaly figured out so I left them to the floppy + F6 in the end.

Not to speak for Buck, but on this board I'm working with (MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum) both of the RAID controllers can be disabled in the bios. Had I wanted to install the two drives just as separate drives I would have disabled the RAID controller prior to installing the OS. This particular board, BTW, defaults to "NV-Raid disabled" if the bios resets. It has two separate integrated RAID controllers:

On-Board SATA
**NV RAID supports 4 SATA ports (SATA1-4). SATAII Transfer rate is up to
300MB/s.
**Silicon Image’s SATARAID5 supports another 4 SATA ports (SATA5-8). SATA
Transfer rate is up to 150MB/s.

 

[time]

However, if you are going to make a RAID array on these boards the RAID drivers either have to be F6'ed in during the beginning of the Win-OS install or slipstreamed onto the CD as a textmode driver using OEM Preinstall.

No Steve, that's the point I was trying to make. You can happily build the RAID array *after* the Windows install.

 

[Groltz]

That didn't seem possible, David.

 

[time]

Well, it certainly surprised me, at least until I realized that nVidia RAID (and every other onboard RAID) is really software RAID. That is, it's a process that the OS runs, not just a driver (probably bad terminology, but it's all I can manage right now).

BTW, although I was able to convert from RAID 1 to RAID 0, it wouldn't let me go the other way - so there are definitely limitations.

 

[Buck]

With the Gigabyte boards that I've used, there is a PATA/SATA-RAID option that is enabled by default, which I normally disable. Plus, for other Gigabyte boards that include NV-RAID and a Silcon Image controller, there is another option labeled RAID-5, which is enabled by default, for the Silicon Image controller.

 

[time]

Okay, I've tried to reproduce the technique I outlined, but the result is abject failure. I'm starting to wonder if I was using XP64 ...

In fact, I think screwing around trying to get the array to boot just hosed the contents of one drive. :x

 

[time]

Well, I'm not sure what I did previously, but here's one way to do it:

1. Press F10 at boot and create mirrored array.
2. Power down and disconnect one drive.
3. Power up and install Win-whatever, then install nVidia IDE drivers.
4. Power down and reconnect second drive.
5. Power up. The BIOS will scream that the array is degraded.
6. Press F10 and select Rebuild, then Add.
7. In Windows, Media Monitor should say the array is rebuilding.

This approach worked for me with both Win2k and XP64. You can use the nVidia conversion utility to convert RAID 1 to RAID 0.

 

[P5-133XL]

Truely a klutzy solution. But hey, if it works, ...

 

[Bozo]

Well, it certainly surprised me, at least until I realized that nVidia RAID (and every other onboard RAID) is really software RAID.

On my Supermicro P4SCT+II the RAID is setup in a menu that you envoke during bootup. There is no way you can convert RAID 1 to RAID 0 without going back to the menu and destroying the original setup. This onboard RAID is in hardware. The motherboard uses Intel chipsets.

Bozo :mrgrn: