Boot problems from RAID Array

I have recently reinstalled my system (K7N2G-ILSR).
It was working fine with a RAID array to boot (set to boot from SCSI in Bios).
The RAID array is 1 SATA drive with 1 IDE on IDE3.
I have 2 additional IDE HDDs and 2 Optical Drives (On IDE1&2).
I also have a SCSI controller with one external drive.
While reinstalling I had problems in the windows installer - after partitioning and copying files it would try to reboot, and would then come up NTLDR missing.
I initially thought it must be some confusion with my external SCSI drive trying to boot, but removing made no odds.
I ultimately had to unplug all my non raid HDDs, and it would then boot no problem at all. Unfortunately having got it working, every time I try to plug any IDE HDD back in, it goes back to NTLDR Missing on boot (this is despite boot being set to SCSI in bios, IDE isnt even later in the boot sequence!)
I need to be able to reconnect my drives, but cant find anything comparable in the forum.
Why does it matter if I connect an IDE drive at all when it is set to boot from SCSI (RAID)? Is my bios corrupt or something?
Thanks for any help!
Martyn

Thanks Noby and Richard for the advice, and sorry I have been slow to read it - I've been away.
I'm not sure I didn't do my last installation in exactly the way you describe anyway. Still, it's probably worth another go.
I was hoping for an easy solution without reinstalling yet again, since the system is working albeit with only the RAID array connected.
Assuming the other drives do now have an MBR written to them, even if I reinstall windows without them connected, will they not still cause problems when reconnected?
Am I looking at having to wipe the drives and start again with them too?
Even if I do this, does formatting a drive wipe any MBR on it?
Is there not some way to directly edit the boot record on each drive when windows installer doesn't figure it out right?
Sorry for the multitude of questions but I have had this problem time and time again and never found a reliable solution - last time it seemed simple chance that I ever got the board working!
Thanks again
Martyn

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KT4 Ultra: problem config. raid array IDE3

I owe the MSI 6590 KT4 Ultra BSR mainboard and I have difficulties configurring the RAID array in striping mode, on the IDE3 controller.
The manual describes on page 2-18 it's possible to connect up to 2 hard drives, cdrom, 120mb fd and other devices to the IDE3 controller.
Unfortunately only one of my two MAXTOR D740X-6L (6L080J4) 80gig drives is recognized by the array.
One Maxtor hard drive is jumpered as MASTER and the other is set up as SLAVE.
When I hook up the cable to an ordinary IDE port (eg IDE1) the two drives are properly recognized.
Both drives can be formatted using the regular IDE ports, this means without any cluster errors or other errors so the drives are physically OK.
Before I wrote this post I checked the support section again to make sure I am using the latest BIOS which is 1.1. I also downgraded to 1.0, but that didn't solve my problem either.
Since I work in a computer shop now and then I had the opportunity to check two Maxtor Fireball3 30gig drives on a different MS-6590 RAID board (BIOS 1.1.) and exactly the same problem occurs: the 2nd drive won't be recognized in the ARRAY on IDE3.
Please tell me what to do to make the striping option fully work on my two IDENTICAL Maxtor hard drives since MSI support came up with a standard email, which didn't cheer me up at all. Hopefully this time they will investigate this matter since no doubt more people will experience this.

Thanks for the quick response, though it's not satisfactory for me (of course).
Actually before installing the new KT4 Ultra I owed the KT266 Pro RAID motherboard. It's true this board has two controllers for the RAID option. Nevertheless because after reading the manual of this new board I was convinced I could connect two hard drives on the IDE3-channel. This is the reason I decided to go ahead and to upgrade to this new mainboard.
I guess I have to go back to my employer and fall back again to my KT266 (MS6380).

Quicktime won´t open .mov files recovered from raid array discs

Hi, my Apple Raid died on me. I managed to recover the files of each disk and moved into external USB drives.
The files are there, but Quicktime won´t open them. Is there a way to repair these these files ?.
Thanks
Mac Pro Early 2009
Processor 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB
Software OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)
3TB Raid disk / Apple Pro Raid card
AJA Kona LHi card
FCP 7.0.2
OS X 10.8.5
OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Hello Niebby,
According to the description of the issue provided looks like some change has been done in your system. Most probably a change in the installed codecs. I would suggest you to check whether the required codecs are installed under the folder "/Library/QuickTime".
If reinstallation is needed you can check this post "QucikTime Codecs Installation" to get some details about how to proceed.
--Javier
'I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.'

Quicktime won´t open .mov files from raid array

Hi, my Apple Raid died on me. I managed to recover the files of each disk and moved into external USB drives.
The files are there, but Quicktime won´t open them. Is there a way to repair these these files ?.
Thanks
Mac Pro Early 2009
Processor 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB
Software OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)
3TB Raid disk / Apple Pro Raid card
AJA Kona LHi card
FCP 7.0.2
OS X 10.8.5

You don't have it? Just load it! http://support.apple.com/kb/DL923

Cannot boot from RAID 1 drive on K8N Neo4

I am trying to install Win2K on a mirrored RAID array my K8N Neo4 motherboard. Here is all the hardware:
K8N Neo4(MS-7125). The box says K8N Neo4 F, but the intro screen says "Platinum". Bios version 1.9
Hard drives: Two Maxtor Ultra16 250GB 7200 IDE drives. Both on IDE controller 1 as master and slave.
AMD athlon 64 3500
I followed the directions in the manual for booting off a RAID array.
In CMOS, Enabled IDE RAID, IDE Primary Master RAID, and IDE Primary Slave RAID.
In F10 raid setup:
Set up "Mirroring" RAID array using both drives.
Enabled "boot" option for the array.
Array list shows Array as healthy.
Set boot order to "hard drive" then CDROM.
I boot from win2k CD, press F6 to install RAID drivers.
After a bunch of other stuff has been loaded, I am prompted for the RAID drivers. I load both exactly as shown in the manual.
However, I am not sure I have the correct drivers on my floppy. The directions in the manual for creating the floppy are clearly incorrect as they would result in nothing on the floppy. I coppied the contents of the "pataraid" directory to the floppy. The win2k installer asked for "nvata.cat" so I took it from the "sata_ide" directory.
Next, the installer asks me which disk I want to install windows onto. This seems strange as it should see the two disks as one drive.
I tell it to install on the forst drive. It formats the first drive and transfers a bunch of stuff. It then reboots and tries to boot off the hard drive (or RAID array in this case). The computer is unable to boot off the hard drive.
Has anyone seen this?
What should I really make the RAID driver floppy?

I think I know what you are referring to. Nvidiia's documentation for nvRaidMan says that it reconstructs a mirrored array (once the bad drive has ben replaced) slowly over the period of a day. I think this is actually a disadvantage. The promise RAID controller allows you to immediately copy the good drive to the new drive. It can take a while for big drives (like twenty minutes), but then you are fully protecetd again and you dont have this big task in the background all day long. More importantly, the promise documentation makes it clear which drive is being copied to which.
I think I will start looking for a promise RAID controller and just make a mental note not to trust nvidia.

RAID arrays

Hi,
I'm very ignorant about RAID, at least in a lot of ways. Please bear with me for the long following quote.
"The benefit that hardware RAID can offer is two-fold: With hardware RAID systems, your Mac is dumping the data off to the RAID system itself without having to mess with actually writing it to the platters. This can make a noticeable difference when doing CPU and I/O intensive chores like DV editing, working with large publishing files, or graphic design work using really large files."
I'd like to try this. Would either of the following products allow me to set this up for my Mac?
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technology/TSATAIIE4I/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Highpoint%20Technologies/RRAID2310/
And can one boot up from an array for better performance?
Thanks

Let me address your questions:
From the link on the Velociraptor I read this, "Plus, we figured a power user may want dual Velociraptors (RAID 0) to squeeze out even more speed and increase the boot drive total capacity to 600GB. So we included results for "striped" dual drive sets.
Just how did they accomplish that? Or have I asked that already?
Most of the time, a stripped RAID for booting is not helpful in every setup, for every application or person. Have your system on drive A or firewire, and clone it to the RAID after you create it, and the clone is fine.
The "ignore ownership" (to me) is a bug. CCC or SuperDuper should insure ownership is enabled before starting the copy operation. Most attempts that fail, fail because "ownership" box in Volume Get Info was "on."
But... if you haven't been using RAID much in the past, I would forgo for now, and with a couple VRs there are other ways to get the most out of two or three.
Having a "dedicated" boot drive of just the operating system and applications is often enough, and keep all data and media on another drive(s).
I keep the "home account" on 2nd drive or stripped RAID, so I have 3 drives with boot and dual-drive stripped home.
Raptors have been great for replacing SCSI and for scratch arrays.
They did not put their applications on RAID. I've found that it never helped to move any applications off the boot drive. Boot drive should be your fastest drive.
CS3 really needs a dedicated scratch drive so that it doesn't use the boot drive for scratch when working with large files. When you get to 2GB files, you need both a stripped scratch array of 2-4 drives, also dual stripe for boot, and 3rd array for media or saving files. Consider how long you have to wait to save a 2GB file over and over during the day. It adds up.
A dedicated boot drive of any type only needs to be backed up before installing updates or applications or patches. So most of the time, it stays almost the same and weekly backup is more than enough, while data may need to be backed up multiple times a day.
One note: disable Spotlight on scratch editing volumes, it causes problems to CS3 and other programs.
Make a schematic or diagram is what I do, on paper or in my mind, or I sit here with dozens of drives and shuffle files and drives around and move the system and data to where I think I want it and will make sense. Like this week rearranged everything now that I bought 4 new drives and want to run Windows Vista in VMware.

RAID arrays and Windows

Not sure where to post this one. You have been very helpful before so I’ll try again.
The machine is the Media Centre in my signature.
Installed two new Maxtor SATA drives, set up as RAID 0, clean install of XP MCE. Boots on the RAID array. Not a single problem. Installed MSI drivers, XFS video card drivers and KCorp PCI network adaptor for wireless link. Download and install all Windows updates. All OK.
On a later start up it spends long time trying to detect RAID array, then RAID error. Automatically reboots and detects a healthy raid array. Tries to open Windows but screen goes almost black but faint Windows loading page with the short activity bar showing no activity. If left it eventually springs to life. Tried starting in safe mode, no problem. Restore to an earlier restore point, no better.
The RAID problem is intermittent. The Windows problem looks as if it stalls for a variable length of time before it gets going.
Don’t know where to go next. Any suggestions?

fafner: I wanted a large disk to hold recorded TV progs, videos, CDs etc and 160GB is the max for this mainboard. I went for 2x160GB Maxtor drives. As I was using two drives I reasoned I might as well use RAID 0 to get a single volume and a faster machine. In particular I read somewhere that RAID 0 halved, or nearly so, the start up time. Who wants to wait a couple of minutes for the TV to fire up?
Fredrik: The XFX video card drivers are in fact nVidia drivers which are the latest.
Doctor Stu: I have subsequently installed XP on both drives individually. On one it worked well, on the other same old problem: either the drive not found in the BIOS after the heading ‘Detect IDE drives’ or the screen fades as Windows starts up. Checked both drives with Maxtor’s Powermax disk checking utility. Provided the drive was connected to the SATA1 socket and the other drive not connected both passed the Full Test. I could not get Powermax to recognise SATA2 even though both were detected correctly in the BIOS. My conclusion is that the problem was a dodgy connection which I hope has been rectified with all the swapping around.
Is there disk testing utility that puts the disc under load similar to Mem86 for memory?
Will I try RAID again? I doubt it even though it did start up in far less time.
My thanks to all.

Boot Priority with Raid and Single Drives.

I thought I would share something that I discovered yesterday after struggling to get a Sata Raid array to play nicely with a single sata drive.
Sorry if this is already widely known but I couldn’t find any reference to it.
Setup:
MSI K8N Platinum SLI
2x 160GB Maxtor DM10 Raid0 Array (Windows)
1x 160GB Maxtor DM10 Single Drive (Backup)
The main issue I was having was no matter how I setup the array and what I set as the first boot device windows would always try to boot from the single drive.
The array was set to bootable when it was created, and it set to be the first device under the hard disk boot priority sub menu.
If I tried installing windows with the single drive plugged it would always be seen as C: drive and would copy the boot files here even if I selected D: (array) as install location.
If I tried unplugging the single drive and installing windows, it install and boot correctly from the array.
But as soon as I plugged the single drive back in windows would look for the boot files on it and tell me there was an error and no boot files could be found.
When looking through the bios I noticed a setting called “Extended IDE Drive”, this makes the drive appear as an IDE drive so that there is no need to install the sata driver F6 on install.
Once I set this to No/None the drive disappeared from the bios but after a reboot windows saw the drive correctly and allowed me to install windows to the array which was now correctly drive C:
Once windows was installed, the drive appears under the raid controller same as the array drives.
The drive is fully accessible and working natively with the sata drivers installed.

Quote from: jarvo on 30-January-07, 04:38:13
Yeah, not matter what the HDD order is winxp always tries to boot from the single drive when its plugged in.
Not sure if this only happens to me or if other people have had similar issues.
IDE drivers becomes automatically as 1st HDD. you need to switch them.
have you arranged hard disk boot priority? (not main priority)
have a try to push "F8" or "F11" during post to popup menu, and choice correct HDD to boot from there.

Will mavericks boot from a raid array?

Will OS X Mavericks boot from a raid array? I know Lion didn't support booting from a RAID.

Well, since no one seems to want to answer this question I've done a little research and answered it myself. Yes, you can boot from a RAID while running OS X Mavericks. The only setback is that you can't create a recovery partition.
While installing Mavericks on a RAID it will prompt you to OK installing without a recovery partition. In laymen's terms it means you have to keep your own backup. If your RAID fails you will lose the data or whatever is stored on it. Simply keep your own backup and you'll be fine. This is the way most people do it anyway. Yes, it may be considered old wave but it's still the best option. It's an absolute. If you have a backup, you never to have cross your fingers, pray and hope the recovery process actually works!
That being said, you can create some really souped up Macs. I actually installed two 480GB SSDs into a 2.8GHz Macbook Pro and the response is phenominal !!! From power on button to sign in screen is less than 10 seconds on a 5 year old Macbook Pro !!! If you hate seeing the little spinning wheel while shutting down this will cure your distress. Shutting down is instantaneous. I love it !!! RAID and SSDs are the best !!! A newer Quad-Core machine has to be even faster which is hard to imagine.
That's my 2 cents ...

Booting from external SATA firewire800 hardware RAID array

Just a quick post to update on a new toy and how it's being used.
Recently obtained a hardware RAID array which contains 5 drives at 250 GB each. Currenly setup as RAID 5, providing 1TB of storage.
After formating via DISk image I did a drive restore from my normal boot disk to the new array.
I changed the startup options to boot from the array.
So basically I am running my system from this new device.....I may later reconfig the array to 0+1 with a floating spare.
Cost of the box was 500. New and unused off ebay.

..

P965 won't boot DVD from Intel SATA with RAID enabled

System specs
1 x MSI P965 Platinum
1 x Intel Core 2 Duo 6420
2 x 1GiB Geil PC6400 DDR2/800
2 x 320G Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
1 x Pioneer 212 SATA CD/DVD Writer
Configuration has both hdd's in RAID mode (on the ICH8 SATA connectors), with RAID volumes setup and functional.
My DVD drive is plugged into the SATA-5 connector (ICH8).
I have disabled the JMicron sata/ide (since I don't want to use it).
BIOS recognises the SATA DVD drive in the POST as an ATAPI CDROM. And an existing windows installation recognises the DVD drive.
The problem is that I cannot boot from the DVD drive. I have even tried the boot menu directly (F11) - there is a momentary flicker on the DVD drive, but after a while, booting continues from the HDD anyway.
Please help, I'm trying to install XP onto a different partition, and if I cannot boot from the optical drive, it may present some difficulties ;-)
Has anyone else had a similar issue? Or can offer any help on tuning the BIOS settings?
Regards
The Wibbler

Maesus
In my first post, I said that the DVD is plugged into the SATA-5 connector (on the ICH8), the JMicron sata connector is not used.
I also said that my configuration has 2x 320G drives configured as a RAID array (on SATA-0,SATA-1 if that matters), hence BIOS is set to "RAID" mode - if it were IDE or AHCI I would suspect my RAID array would not function (haven't tested this, but it seems logical).
If the system boots from HDD, the DVD drive (on SATA-5) is fully functional from Windows XP, just that the BIOS won't boot from the DVD drive on the ICH8.
Jack the Newbie
I have tried the JMicron SATA connector, but WinXP setup disk causes BSOD if the drive is configured as IDE in BIOS. And after some more hair pulling I figured out that if I slipstream the JMicron RAID drivers and configure the JMicron as RAID, then WinXP setup accesses the DVD correctly. Seems like a lot of hoops to be jumping through :(

Booting from RAID 10

Hello All,
As I have noticed for all other posts regarding RAID, people like to know why I want it. I am doing it for the sake of having it as a practicum as I am a computer engineering student. If you would like more details message me off the post.
Now onto the problem I am having.
As far as I can tell from reading www.macprojournal.com and some other sources, my Mac Pro should be able to boot off of RAID 10 using 4 identical disks (Seagate 500Gb 7200.10). I have tried many different combinations of raid (10, 0+1, 0, 1) and it does not seem any allows a bootable disk volume. I am able to load the OS onto certain RAID volumes but upon reboot the system shows each disk as a separate volume and does not allow me to boot since the OS was loaded onto a RAID volume.
So far I have seen that Softraid makes a software that will create bootable raid 1 volumes, which leads me to believe that my Mac Pro can not natively create these same kind of volumes.
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction to get this to work. As some more notes, I am using the GUID partitioning scheme and have tried creating all RAIDs at once and creating each separately and then combining them. I am at a loss to whether this is possible without third-party software.
I will try and answer any further questions that my help someone help me.
Thanks in advance.
Mac Pro 2.66Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.8) Powerbook G4 1.33Ghz

I have been able to load the OS (10.4.7) onto a striped set, but then it prompts for startup disk and only gives me options of individual disks upon reload (even after updating to 10.4.8). I have tried this a few times hoping it's a glitch. It's as if on reload it doesn't see the RAID as up, even though when I then go into the install disk and disk utility is shows it's up just fine.
I had hoped to get one striped set up and then set up the second striped and mirror them, since doing it all at once does not work at all.
When I have the RAID 10 built and load the OS, it stops and reloads before asking for the second disk and then starts the install from scratch.
When I load it onto a single disk I have no problems, but I want the RAID to work as it seems it should.
Mac Pro 2.66Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.8) Powerbook G4 1.33Ghz

Is it possible to record data directly from PXI-5112 scope card through PXI bus to SCSI RAID array (connected to PXI-8210)?

Colleagues,
Is it possible to record data directly from PXI-5112 scope card through PXI bus to SCSI RAID array (connected to PXI-8210)?
Which will be the maximum transfer rate for continuous data recording?
Thank you,
Sergey
Sergey

Sergey,
The PXI-8210 can connect to any SCSI 2 compliant device. If the RAID controller is SCSI 2 and appears just like a hard drive in the operating system, then you can send data directly to the RAID array. The problem is that the driver for the PXI-5112 does not yet support continuous acquisition. The on-board 16MB or 32MB buffer stores the data until the entire acquisition is completed. Once the acquisition complete, all of the data is transferred from the on-board buffer to the hard drive. After that happens, the NI 5112 is ready for another acquisition.
Best Regards,
Jace Curtis
NI Applications Engineering

K7N2G-ILSR raid boot problem

Hi,
I have an msi K7N2G-ILSR mobo and am having boot problems on the raid system.
Everything worked fine (raid 0 set up sata) and would boot fine, the bios had to be set up to look for other boot devices in order for the system to boot with raid drives.
Problem occurred when I added an ide card to give me 2 more ide channels. Still fine if I only connect cd roms to new card but as soon as I connect a hard drive it appears the msi board stops looking for the raid drives as a boot device, because I get the message NIVIDIA Boot Agen PXE-2.0(build 082 v1.82)
Copyright......................(info)
Copyright......................(info)
CLIENT MAC ADDR 00 10 DC E1 4C AD GUID:
FFFFFFFFFF..-FFF..-FFFFFF... etc.
PXE-53: No boot filename received.
PXE-MOF: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
It seams there needs to be a bios update as when you scroll through boot options (first, second & third) in advanced setup there is no choice for raid. Therefore the only way to boot from raid is to choose “look for other boot devices” and that is OK until you add a second ide card with hard drive on.
I have version 1.6 bios (latest on msi`s site)
Any idears on how to get round this ?

Hi Raven,
For your info windows xp will support any number of ide channels (upto the number of spare pci slots you have).
I have another computer that has 2 extra ide cards in and has 2 dvd`s (on seprate channels) & 6 hard drives as well as raid hard drive set up. Windows is not confused and supports all devices and has done for the last few months ! This mobo has boot from raid in its bios so has no problems on boot up. The reason I need so many ide channels is simply I do video work and need loads of storage space so until I can buy 800gb hard drives for a reasnable price I am stuck with having to buy 200gb drives.
As I said it looks like either a bios update from msi or I`m going to have to buy a new mobo.
Regards.

Another WinXP Sata Raid Boot Problem

Hi there, I've flipped though a bunch of posts but I haven't been able to find the issue I'm having, so I figured I'd post and cross my fingers.
I'm running a K8 Neo4 Platinum board (updated the bios to 1.9) and I'm trying to get it to boot WinXP off a striped pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (400g). With nothing else connected except a DVD drive, floppy drive, and the two HDs on ports 1 and 2 (set to striped array in the Riad setup), I booted up from the WinXP SP2 cd.
Pressed F6, loaded the drivers (newest ones I could find at the msi site). Setup detected an 800g hard disk no problem. Created a small partition (50g) for the OS, formatted normally, and let Setup do it's thing. Everything went fine with no errors, reg key, settings, not a hitch.
And that's where the happiness ended. Upon trying to boot from the drives, WinXP gets as far as loading Wup.sys and simply reboots itself. Safe mode, last known all result in the same reboot. I tried to repair the installation, fixboot, chkdsk, and that simply killed the installation wholesale.
As a side note, I can install boot off a single SATA drive without problems.
It feels like I'm forgetting something really simple, since XP was able to recognize and install without problems, but it just can't boot. I've been fighting with this darn thing for a few days now, and I'm about ready to just give up and run them as single drives. There is no data on there no reformatting or doing something funky is perfectly fine. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Quote from: BOSSKILLER on 05-June-07, 01:32:35
and...? any changes?
get a copy of Memtest86 and test your memory for errors.
another and most suspected thing is your PSU:
"Antec 400W (3.3v/30 5v/28a 12v/14A)"
get a decent PSU with 30A or more on +12V.
Ah, I read the spec wrong. The PSU is dual rails so 12v1 is 14a and 12v2 is 15a. Hopefully, since pretty much everything else is unplugged, that should be enough power to boot.
I tried mem test, no errors after multiple passes.
Also, when I tried the new nVidia drivers, it got me to where I am now. Auto reboot when trying to start Windows. The old MSI drivers gave me an undefined error or an "unmoutable device" error. Both resulted in a bluescreen and immediate reboot.

Boot problems from RAID Array

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