K9A Platinum RAID - Be careful if you're considering this MB

Question

Unbeknownst to me when I purchased this board to replace my ASUS P4S8X which had a Promise FastTrak 376 SATA RAID controller, when you create a mirrorset on the K9A Platinum you *cannot* preserve data. In my wildest dreams I didn't think that would be that way so I never thought to ask before I bought it. A RAID controller that can't preserve that data on one of its members?? Mind boggling to say the least.
Yes folks and it's true, confirmed by MSI support:
"ATI Raid Controller does not support this feature which is the chipset limitation which you will need to create the raid array and have a fresh install."
That's real nice eh? Completely re-install everything from scratch? <<Removed>> I just did that a week and an a half ago when I lost the MBR after a failed disk and Windoze fixmbr clobbered the partition table. That took 16 hours not including the Windoze install time. Don't want to do that again.
Plan B: Boot a knoppix CD and use dd_rescue to duplicate the disks then create the mirrorset, sync them and cross my fingers.
But that's only the half of it. In playing around with changing the IDE setting from Native IDE to raid, XP blue screens after the Logo with a 7b error. Haven't looked into that yet but I suspect it's because it doesn't have the drivers for the now raid controller. I'll worry about that once I have a sync'd mirrorset created.
When the IDE chipset is set to RAID in the BOIS I tried booting Windoze install disk and adding in the drivers for the now RAID chipset, it fails every time. I think I'm using the right drivers, need to confirm that, ahci8086, but every time it tries to load the driver it tells me that ahci8086.sys is corrupt. I've downloaded it numerous times with the same result. Same thing with the one off the included CD. The ahci8086.sys file is dated 5/18/2006 and I've got the latest which is dated 7/27/2006 which I don't think I tried yet but plan too. If I'm using the wrong driver for when the IDE BOIS is in RAID mode, please let me know but that's what is delivered in the ATI SB600 IDE RAID download so I assume that would be correct. Or maybe I'm supposed to be using one of the Silicon Image driver sets, I couldn't find any information anywhere on what is the correct driver.

Answer 1

I got censored?!?! I don't know where this Forum is headquartered or based, but here in the United States of America we have a thing called "Free Speech" that protects the citizens of our Country from exactly what has just occurred here.
What was censored wasn't really that bad, no profane language or anything, just a reference to the shortsightedness of some engineers. I hope this isn't a Forum where you're only Welcome if you post "MSI is GREAT!" and are not allowed to even whisper anything even slightly negative about them...
As a background I've been in IT support roles for around 25 years. Managed Digital Equipment Corp. VAX's and Alpha's (VMS, ULTIRX, and Tru64 UNIX, started using VAX's in 1978), Sun's Enterprise large servers and assortment of other SPARC boxes (Solaris), IBM 6x0's, and a host of smaller systems running both UNIX and Linux. I cut my teeth on DEC's ULTRIX.
That said, to come across a RAID controller in the year 2006 that will not allow you to preserve the data on one of its members when creating a mirrorset is just unconscionable. So I made reference to the shortsightedness of the engineers by referring that they might be something, and that got censored. I was hoping that might be a wakeup call to these engineers, sort of like a 2x4 upside the head, so they don't make a mistake like this again.
And I learned something else about the ATI SB600 South Bridge RAID controller which once again is just unconscionable. If you take a disk with a filesystem on it, with data, and have the SB600 present it to the OS as a JBOD, it clears the partition table. What!?!? Yes. There is no warning that this is going to occur. Promise's FastTrak controllers *do not* wipe out the partition table. They just present any disk that is not part of a mirrorset to the OS. That seems like a really good idea, ya think? But the SB600 don't do that, it doesn't present the disk to the OS unless it is part of and LD so you have to assign it to one as a JBOD. Poof! Partition table gone!
I just cannot fathom the mindset of the engineers that created the ATI SB600 South Bridge RAID functionality. They just do not seem to be aware of what is expected of a RAID controller in this day and age. They must live their life very sheltered and not have any idea of what other vendors are doing and what the users of their products expect.
Bottom line: The MSI K9A Platinum seems to be a decent MB, but better suited for an full install from scratch then as a replacement MB for an existing, running, seasoned system, if the objective is to use the SB600 RAID controller and preserve existing data on existing disks. I know there's multiple ways to get around this, but that's jumping through hoops that I never had to jump through before.
If anyone is interested I was able to use my existing disk's mirrorset and preserve the OS and data on them.
The steps:
1. Know which is the disk you want to use and duplicate the data from, like Port 1 Master (this is related to SATA drives connected to the MB).
2. Using the FastBuild BIOS Utility create a mirrorset using the two drives. Set Gigabyte Boundary to OFF, set Fast Init to OFF. DO NOT SET Fast Init TO ON, YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MBR!
NOTE! NOTE! NOTE! If you're so inclined to use the ATI SATA RAID Utility that you can get from MSI's website to initially create the mirrorset that comes along with WebPAM which you put and use on a bootable floppy, DO NOT "Initialize Array", DO NOT "Synchronize Array", NO, NO, NO!
3. Boot the OS if it will boot but I doubt it BUT DON'T LET IT BOOT INTO THE OS. With the OS only really on one of the disks I don't know what would happened and if the RAID controller uses the "Read Least Busy" algorithm who knows what will happened.
4. Power down the system and unplug the SATA drive that DOES NOT have the OS on it.
5. See if the system will boot. If so great, proceed to step 7.
6. Do what you have to do to get the system to boot with only the one, original drive connected and in the mirrorset. Ignore for now the FastBuild warnings on boot that mirrorset is CRITICAL. In my case I had to use the Windows XP install CD and Repair an existing installation.
7. Install from MSI ATI's WebPAM utility.
8. Power down the system.
9. Connect the SATA drive that is to be the second member of the mirrorset that you disconnected in step 4. Power up the system. When you get FastBuild's warning that your mirrorset is CRITICAL ignore it. DO NOT GO INTO THE FASTBUILD BIOS AND DO A REBUILD THERE. NO! NO! NO! I tried that once on a 500GB mirrorset and after 8 hours with the drive activity light blinking sort of dimly it's progress was still at 0%.
10. Once the OS is running (Windows I presume, XP Pro in my case), start WebPAM. if all went well you will see that WebPAM knew the mirrorset was missing a member, found the FREE drive you reconnected in step 9, and is already in the process of rebuilding the mirrorset. If not, you can manually start the rebuilding process in WebPAM.
Of note, WebPAM only took somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 hours to rebuild the 500GB mirrorset as opposed to the BIOS rebuild running for 8 hours and accomplishing nothing. (This wasn't a one time anomaly, I had tried it before letting it run a few hours and saw no progress. The 8 hour run was just to be sure.) While the WebPAM rebuild is running you are in Windows and it is running and you could do other things. I didn't though, I left it run until it finished.
There ya go, a rather unorthodox way to make a mirrorset on a MSI K9A Platinum preserving your OS and data and getting around the shortcomings of the ATI SB600 South Bridge RAID implementation.
And I know I could have used Ghost. But that is in hindsight. I would have had to know I needed to do that *before* removing and replacing the MB. But I didn't do that, because I didn't know I was dealing with a brain dead RAID controller.
<Added some more info in the steps.>