RAID array activation issue in CS2 & XP

Yes, I still have CS2, which I love, as well as Production Studio. I have used CS2 for years with a RAID array, first striped and now a mirror. The mirror array lasted about 10 months until the motherboard went. eVGA replaced the motherboard with the same model, I fiddled around a bit trying to get my same array up and running, I couldn't figure it out and ended up doing a reinstall (after a couple of weeks of running single drives). Anyway, I keep having to activate my Adobe Suites. I have talked to people (thick accents, maybe in India) three times now; takes a lot of time. I know that there is an issue with CS2 and RAID (XP and CS2 have all of their available updates). I tell them I have RAID. I ask for a patch to avoid the activation issue. I have been told that I "should not be using RAID", that I will "have to reactivate every time I boot" and that I won't be able to run this "without upgrading to CS4". I KNOW that this configuration will work, because it has worked in the past. I vaguely remember a patch when I originally installed.
I just called the Tech Support number, instead of the activation number. I also got someone with a thick accent who told me that he had no support available for CS2. He wouldn't give me a phone number to call, I asked about a patch and he "doesn't support CS2", end of discussion. He suggested the website. Ugh!
I am not locked out at this time, but have just done another reactivation. I suspect Adobe will put a stop to repeat activations. I worry about being locked out when I am under the gun trying to finish something. My son is working on a school project for the end of year right now. What can I do? Does anyone know where I can find a patch or talk to someone who will help a CS2 user?
I LIKE my RAID array. I know that my data is perfectly backed up at all times. I would prefer not to have to break the RAID array into single drives. I chose this MB because of the RAID capability.
Thanks in advance!

Thanks Bob. I asked to speak to a supervisor with calls two and three to India, or wherever. One lady said they didn't have a supervisor and then said, well, of course we have supervisors, but they will not be able to help. I guess I could have thrown a fit, but neither was willing to connect me to a supervisor even though I asked. I did find it amusing (in a sad way) that the one lady initially denied that she had a supervisor.
I then called Customer Support (call number four) and they simply wouldn't talk to me. They don't deal with CS2, didn't want to talk to me at all.
I guess I'll try India again, next time it locks me out.
I'll go through old files (again) to see if I saved some kind of patch.
Thanks again.

Similar Messages

CS4 Master Collection Activation issue

I have installed CS4 master collection on my 2 PC's.
The first of these was a new build PC using Vista Ultimate 64bit, I installed Vista and CS4 on a RAID 0 array comprising 3 Sata drives. CS4 was then activated on this machine as well as my other machine.
After a couple of days the RAID array started showing errors, which I believe was down to the poor nVidia drivers / onboard controller.
Anyway I reinstalled Vista & CS4 onto a single drive, when it came to activating CS4 however I get a message saying the serial no. has already been activated on 2 machines.
Now Adobes FAQ states that CS4 will recognise a reinstall on the same machine, however I think that because I have gone from a RAID array to a single drive then CS4 will not be able to detect this as the data will have been spread over the 3 physical drives.
I have contacted Adobe support and am waiting on a response, in the meantime is there something simple I have missed?

The RAID problem was with CS2.
The OP's issue is that he didn't deactivate before reinstalling. Only
Adobe can help and there should be a phone number to call for activation
assistance on the activation denial screen.
Bob

Unable to add partition on raid array, device or resource busy.

Greetings,
I want to be able to create a disk image of a software raid of one of my arch box.
I'm able to create my image with G4U successfully. I'm also able to restore my image without error on my new box.
When my system boot up, I make sure that my raid array are up by doing cat /proc/mdstat.
I can see that md1 and md2 are 2 of 2 and active raid 1. But, when I look at md0 this is what I got:
md0 : active raid1 sdb3[1]
6289344 blocks [2/1] [_/U]
I try to add the partition sda3 to md0 array with this command:
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda3
The output of this command give me this :
mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sda3: Device or resource busy.
It seems that this error only occurs on /dev/md0 (/) array. I'm 100% sure that both, my image and my drive (vmware hdd) are good.
This is my partition table:
/dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 = /boot (md1) 100MB
/dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 = swap (md2) 2048MB
/dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 = / (md0) 8GB
I have also tried the image creation with Acronis... same error.

I solved my issue.
My menu.lst was wrong..
kernel /kernel26 root=/dev/md0 ro
I should add this to my menu.lst:
kernel /kernel26 root=/dev/md0 ro md=0,/dev/sda3,/dev/sdb3
Now it work.
I followed the archlinux raid guide who's telling this:
Nowadays (2009.02), with the mdadm hook in the initrd it it no longer necessary to add kernel parameters concerning the RAID array(s).
Which is wrong because my distro is 2009.02, if someone can add a note to the wiki it can be usefull.
Thanks for your support

Raid array being seen as 2 individual drives

Hi. Here is the issue as posted in other places. Still searching for the answer to this one.
Specs:
K7n2 delta2 platinum with b50 bios
2x1gb crucial pc3200 2.5cas ram
AMD Barton 2500
2 x 160gb 7200rpm 8mb cache SATA Samsung Hdd's
Thermaltake 430w psu
Gainward fx5700 ultra graphics
OS's: original xp corp, slipstreamed xp corp sp2
raid drivers: nvraid.sys v4.27, 5.10, 5.11 (also the needed nvatabus.sys with those)
I am NOT overclocked.
fsb 166
1:1 ram/cpu
no spread spectrum or other garbage
ddr400 patch disabled
PSU gives presumably stable reading (according to what I see), with amperage ratings above the required.
checked and rechecked cables for bad ones
ran mulitple scans on drives, all come up drives OK
I HAVE installed into Raid 0 already, this is not an issue of hardware failure as far as I am concerned.
So here is the scenario
I have properly set up the array, using correct bios settings and the raid setup utility, for a raid 0 array of those 2 hdd's listed. When booting into xp, either version, I have used all 3 of the driver sets listed. I have been reinstalling to do some performance tests on different configurations.
Anyway, for the last few nights I have been trying to get the windows setup to see the raid 0 array as one 300gb drive. It does not, no matter what I try. It sees them as 2 drives, each being 160gb (or thereabouts). These drives are matched, same firmware, same lot, so that should not be an issue.
I have used numberous tools to delete the mbr on the drives, both in an array and as single drives. I have done the same as well as tried an install and formatted each drive individually, still the same effect when the raid array is recreated.
Basically, I can find no good reason why the array is seen as individuals and not as an array. It is interesting to note, that even though xp setup sees the the array as 2 drives, I can complete the text based portion of setup. However, rebooting to start the GUI portion of setup, it will not boot. Obviously becuase the bios has the controller as the nvraid controller and it is supposed to be a raid 0 array, so I expected that.
Short of rewriting the mbr, either by deleting it or by changing each drive by formatting/partitioning/installing an OS on them, I cannot think of how to fix this. I know the drives and xp cd's work because I have already installed with them.
I understand what to do in the bios portion, and in the raid setup utility portion. I know that I can boot into windows as a single drive and use the nvraid tool to set it up, but that is not the way it should be, and that is not the way I am going to learn WHY this is happening.
Roger that. First set in bios enable raid (in this bios I have to enable IDE array, then choose which controller to actually enable raid on, which happens to have been SATA 1 & 2).
Second, upon reboot, I use the F10 key to enter raid utility. Then, set to striping, set stripe size (which was one of the things I am testing), and add the drives to the array. Next step is to create it. It asks to clear disc data, and it is done.
Have deleted that array as well as just cleared it. Have deleted it and reboot and rebuild it. Have deleted it, reboot, change bios back to non-raid, reboot. Reboot. Change bios back to raid enabled. Reboot. Rebuild array in raid utility, reboot. Run setup, only see 2 hdd's, not one array.
Umm, yep, that is about it.
More to the story now.
From some other posts I tried this.
1. destroy array. reboot. disable raid in bios. reboot. verify sata's visible as singles in bios.
2. power down. pull plugs on sata's. reboot. no drives visible.
3. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait 60 seconds. re-pin jumper. power up.
4. verify no drives. verify default bios settings. all is good
5. plug drives in. reboot. seen as singles. erase mbr on both drives. reboot
6. enable raid in bios, and choose sata 1 & 2 as "enabled". reboot.
7. use F10 key to setup raid. Here is the interesting part. Even though I deleted the array prior to all of this, and removed the drives to force an ESCD update, and cleard the cmos with the board jumper, and then before raid was enabled, cleared the mbr on the drives, when I started the raid utility, the array was already set up. That is the problem, whatever that is. I have read snippets where it is claimed that this chip or bios or whatever stores some kind of a table on this stuff, but this is a bit out of hand.
That combination, IMO, should have cleared anything out. But, the saga continues.
Thanks for you help BWM
[Edit] BTW, I have finally found a utility that will see a raid array and allow me to clear the arrays mbr. It is called SuperFdisk and is at ptdd.com. So far the only one that see's the 2 drives as 1.
Yeppers.
Started with v5.10 which came on a floppy with the mobo. Told setup to use both, nvatabus.sys and nvraid.sys. Even switched which one of the 2 I picked first, just to see.
Same thing with v4.27 and v5.11. Also tried it with just the nvraid.sys and just the nvatabus.sys (which obviously does squat for raid, lol)
Trying some new things now. Post in a little bit.
I am officially at 'Wit's End'.
Here is what I have tried now.
1.pull drive cables. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait. power up. no drives
2.plug sata 1 in. boot. drive detected.
3.boot to command.com, run MHDD, which is a nice russian utility similar to Spinrite. Used this to clear the mbr at hardware level, and do a complete erase.
4. reboot to command.com. run superfdisk. erase mbr.
5. pull plug on sata 1, and plug in sata 2 with sata 1 cable. repeat the erasure steps listed above.
6. pull plug on sata 2, no sata plugged in. reboot
7. change bios to raid enable on sata 1 & 2. power down
8. plug in sata 1 & 2. power up.
9. inspect raid utility. no listing of any arrays. reboot
10. in raid utility, build array. did NOT clear discs. reboot
11. attempt install. single drives found again (used both drivers).reboot
12. in raid utility, optioned to CLEAR discs (funny, rebuild option is never valid).reboot
13. attempt install, both drivers, still seen as 2 individuals.
Things to note. When creating an array when presumably there are none, it assigns the raid array an ID of 2. Upon reboot, the ID is now 1. Don't know what difference that makes.
Also, tried the install listed above with APIC functionality both off and on. Also, when on, set MPS to both 1.1 and 1.4. In addition to this, each variant I tried manual HAL layers of, in this order, ACPI (the one that actually spells ACPI out), ACPI Uniprocessor, MPS Uniprocessor, and let it choose it for me.
So, here I sit in a barca-lounger at 'Wit's End', with a warm cup of java and a dinner mint.

Here is the final product on the floppy disk that I used to successfully install a stable raid 0 on the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Ultra 400 Platinum ms-6570e motherboard.
On root of floppy, from driverset 6.70. (after much testing, I used driver pack 5.10 for my nic and smbus. I used the realtek sound drivers off the cd for audio. I have used every driver pack I could find, and while some did offer better I/O or read/write latency, this set in general provided the most stable environment. The only drivers I used were these floppy drivers for SATA, the nic and smbus just mentioned, the sound just mentioned, and updating the nvide drivers to mside drivers)
<from sataraid directory>
disk1
idecoi.dll
nvatabus.sys
nvraid.cat
nvraid.inf
nvraid.sys
nvraidco.dll
<from legacy directory>
nvata.cat
nvatabus.inf
I used the txtsetup.oem from the sataraid directory, but edited this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvraid.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvraid.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvraid.cat
To this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvata.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvatabus.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvata.cat
Now, it is important to note that I installed or attempted to install at least 50 times. Bare minimum. I noticed when I use this custom driver disc that in the GUI portion of setup, XP asks me for files from the disc. I tried lot's of different things to alleviate this, and denied some of them.
One thing that really bugged me was that the bios would see my #2 optical, slave on secondary IDE channel. A dvd/rw drive. And I could even start the setup from it. But, once I got about 3/4 through copy file stage on text setup portion, I would hang. Becuase the drive was no longer accessible. Booting from the master would get me to the desktop, but the slave optical was nowhere to be found. Updating the ATA/IDE controller to the ms ide drivers would get it visible, but I kept having issues with stability after I did that.
The most stable method I found was to use my above listing of driver files for the floppy, and when in GUI mode setup asks about NVCOI.DLL, I skipped it, ignored it, and did not let setup install it. That actually got me to the desktop, with access to the slave optical as a "removable drive". It even knew what the hardware was. It just could not access it. On a reboot however, back to not seeing it. This method however did allow me to update the nvide driver with the mside driver with no stability issues. So, for me it was a raving success.
Here are some links regarding the SATA RAID driver workaround:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:jHbX5bNfGx4J:www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t51140.html+nforce2+nvraid.sys+ms+ide&hl=en&client=opera
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=292&Itemid
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:J9UhG2Kd8W4J:www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php%3Ft%3D32751+xp+2+sata+raid+0+seen+as+individual&hl=en&client=opera
Early on one problem I noticed was that in text setup mode of xp installation, there were long pauses that I have never seen before. I noticed that with both ide and sata installs. Also I noticed that when booting there was a really long pause when the xp logo is first seen in a sort of dim state till when it became bright and vivid.
Come to find out that this is a more or less typical scenario. Most instances that I read about were all pointing to the nvide driver. So, I found if I just updated the PATA controller to the standard ms ide driver, that went away and the whole system ran better.
It took awhile to figure out that if you install a driver with the nForce2 chip, you had to uninstall it or you will have issues. Herein was the main problem I encountered with the SATA RAID installs. The nvatabus.sys driver was required for an SATA RAID install. Omitting the ata driver was impossible. And for awhile I had no success updating the ms ide driver once I was to the desktop without major instability. Here are some links regarding the drivers for this chipset:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/latest-drivers-for-nforce-3-vt60240.html
In my browsing I came across some pretty interesting articles regarding ACPI. One thing I started playing with was the different HAL layers that xp installs on it's own, vs. me picking one manually (F5 key). I must have started the setup at least 50 times to figure out this: that this particular board does not give me the bios settings to install xp with anything but the ACPI Uniprocessor Hal. For instance, the MPS Uniprocessor HAL is much more responsive, but it lacks the IRQ's needed for setup to see the raid array. I booted to each one, some locking the system up, some booting OK. The one I found the best performance with early on was the one that spells out ACPI, not just initialized. (sorry, I don't want to look it up).
I seemed to be getting closer, but I could not find the needed bios settings to properly manage my ACPI, and since I was trying for RAID, I could not use the one that did work. Here is a link for that kind of stuff.
http://www.fceduc.umu.se/~jesruv98/info/acpi/acpi.html
Another thing that I did not like was being forced to use the dynamic overclocking feature of this board. I have a 333mhz barton core, and I have ddr400 ram. In optimized (fool proof) mode in bios, I was running asynchronous. I did not want that. So I set it down to run at 166mhz, with very slow and conservative settings on everything. Unfortunately, if I did this "manual" method, I was forced to use the dynamic overclocking. I thought I had that figured out. So I set everything to "optimized". But, as it turns out, the system had terrible stability without the dynamic overclocking set to at least Private. What this meant is that I could not rule out that my stability issues (corruptions and hangs and bsod) were from being overclocked even a tiny bit or not. And as if that were not enough, this bios has a special set of settings you must unlock to see. And one of those is paramount in achieving a stable system. It is called the DDR400 patch, and it is enabled by default. So, by pressing SHIFT+f2 AND CTRL+F3, these settings are now available. Like I said, I had to disable that DDR400 patch setting.
I also found out from the first day that my board shipped with the latest bios. I flashed the 2 prior versions with no success in more stability. After about 6 weeks of getting whipped on by this board, I found mention of some modded bios's for this board. I have used modded bios's in the past, some worked wonders, others required some serious effort to recover from. What I found out about this board is that there are 2 players who make the modded bios's. Here is the first index I found from a german website. This one actually is for the older B4 version only for the Platinum.
http://storage-raid-forum.de/viewtopic.php?t=2824
And here is an english forum for pretty much the same thing
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/bios-mods-for-k7n-and-k8-boards-vt55014.html
These links have a bit more information, and I decided to go with these. I tried versions b61,b62 and b71. I found b71 to work the best for me. Mind you I am not into overclocking or what-have-you. Just a rig that performs as well as it was advertised to do. Try these out for the bios information:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=385480
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=84715.0B62
Here is a page that had a bunch of misc stuff I found interesting:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:QkvLeKcbwjQJ:www.amdzone.com/modules.php%3Fop%3Dmodload%26name%3DPNphpBB2%26file%3Dviewtopic%26p%3D75383+nforce2+ultra+nvraid+driver+freeze&hl=en&client=opera
In the end, I have, I think, conquered this board. My findings can be summed up as follows, all in my opion only I guess.
1. There are some ACPI/APIC issues with this board or this chipset. I believe it also included drivers and some can be attributed to XP.
2. There are some major bios issues with this board.
3. There are some major driver issues concerning SATA/RAID. I am not sure who get's the boob prize, nVidia or MSI.
The only way I have found to get RAID 0 installed and stable is to modify my bios (which is a modded beta version), modify my driver disk for SATA/RAID, modify my install sequence for those drivers, modify my drivers within windows after setup, use different drivers from different driver packs for different pieces of hardware, and modify my HAL layer after everything else is done, to achieve peak performance.
If I had not spent soooo much time trying to get a stable install, I would have built up an Unattended CD, which has some possibilities for forcing non WHQL drivers. But, hey man, I am totally burn out on this board. And all it was for is a spare LAN box for when I go to a lanparty. Sheesh. Murphy's law.
Oh, and I also found out, with my own eyes, that the Soyo KT600 Dragon+ that I dumped for this wonderful board, is way faster. Faster read/writes, faster throughput on the nic, faster booting, much faster installs of xp. As a matter of fact, I could get my KT600 to get a consistent thruput on the network to my older KT266a board at 99%. That is pretty fast. 2 of these Platinum boards, on a sweet switch that is tweaked, will only go up to 91%, no matter how much I tweak them. The gigabit connects via a crossover cable at about 38% of full bore. This is tweaked stuff, but still. I listened to the hype. Dual channel memory, giglan, etc etc.
I hope this may help anyone else out there who is still fighting with these issues.
Out.
sul

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.

K8N DIAMOND: New Raid array and old HD... I'm going crazy!!! Please

Hi guys
First, sorry for my poor english...
My problem is:
I bought two Raptor 36 Gb for my new raid array.
I have my old HD Hitachi 250 Gb connected on sata 1.
I connected my two raptor, on sata 3 and 4, I enabled all sata port and raid config for ports 3 and 4.
I restart PC, typed F10 and set a stripe array with two raptor. All run ok...
Restarted and boot with my copy of WinXP with SP2 and NF4 raid drivers.
Installation found my array and my Hitachi;
Hitachi with 4 partitions; C (os), D (driver), E (films), F (music)
I create one partitions on my raid array, and it takes I: letter... So I formatted and start to copy os...
Errors occurs when, restarting pc and resetting the boot to Hard disk (the order of booting is 1 - nvidia array, 2 - hitachi 250 gb), just before loading installation, It shows a black screen with an error: "there is an error in your hard disk bla bla bla.. try to control your connection or connect to windows help....bla bla..."
The Raid array works properly, infact I try to disconnect my Hitachi from sata port 1 and all installation works (I'm writing from Win xp on the raid array).
I tried to connect the hitachi on port 1 of silicon image controller.... same error..!!
I'm desperate... I have all my life on my hitachi...
I think that there's a sort of conflict in drive letter assignement... I cant find a solution ..
PLEASE HELP ME!!!

Glad it worked, I had a feeling it would.
Quote
One question for you.. on G: partition, there's a directory called "Windows", do you suggest me to format this partition??
You can format it if you want to free up space, but unless you moved things around the My documents folder and everything in it is on that partition, along with anything you might of had on the old desktop during that Windows install. You might have something you want there, I usually leave mine for a few month, and figure out if I have everything I need.
Quote
What I have to do, if I need to reinstall WIn XP on first partition of raptor array??
Things should be fine now as Windows marked the Hitachi drive as G. You should be able to reinstall without issue. But if you have a lot of sensitive info on the Hitachi, I would always disconnect the Hitachi if doing a fresh install. Once windows is done installing, hook it back up. But next time you shouldn't have to reconfigure NVRAID after disconnecting and reconnecting.

Quicktime 7.2 and Vista with RAID Arrays

Has anybody been brave enough to install Quicktime 7.2 on their Vista computer which also has a RAID 0 or 1 array? Previous versions of Quicktime have crashed the RAID array necessitating a new computer the first time and a rebuild of the backup RAID driver the second time.
I want to have iTunes and Quicktime on my Vista machine because I have an iPhone and it only syncs with iTunes but I am afraid to try it again. I updated my BIOS and the Intel RAID drivers with a Dell technician a few days ago so I have their "current" drivers but still am not sure this will "fix" the Quicktime crashing Vista RAID array issue.
Any brave souls out there that have tried the latest version with Vista and a RAID array?
PS - I run the latest version of iTunes (7.3.1) and Quicktime (7.2) on my Sony VAIO laptop with Windows XP and it works and I can sync the iPhone there for now.
Dell XPS 410 Windows Vista RAID 1 Array

That sounds good. Those are what i was hopeful about in your case. I haven't seen a report yet of the Intel Matrix issues being fixed by the Dell-tweaked versions of the Matrix updates. However, there have been successes reported with the direct-from-Intel versions of those updates. For example:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=4677972#4677972
(I'm thinking however, that if the PC manufacturer offers its own versions of the updates on its downloads pages for a model, those are the drivers that folks should go for with their models.)
Prior to those updates to the Intel Matrix coming out, the state of the art treatment (using the older models of the Matrix drivers/application) is discussed in this post:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4453007#4453007
But i'd be inclined to go the way you've been going with the Dell technician first.

Can't create raid array in 10.4.6

I am trying to create a mirrored raid array with two Fantom USB 2 external harddrives using disk utility.
I am unable to drag the image of any hard drive into the right window and the create button is never activated.
I have restarted, verified the disks and so on. I hve tried to select a different external disk but that won't work either.
Any ideas what's up.

You can try updating the drivers from the makers site, but it could be that Apple won't allow USB drives to RAIDed.
Unless your recording ET or something where a hard drive failure could mean disaster, mirrors are not ideal form of backup.
Consider auto-cloning and auto-backup software like DeJaVu or Retrospect.
What this will do is give you the benefit of time, cloning will "clone" a whole boot drive and make it bootable in case you need it. (You can clone a whole non-boot drive as well.) Auto-backup will copy user type files and folders, but it's not designed to copy a OS from one drive to another.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/dejavu.html

Windows Vista + nVidia i680 MB + RAID5 + iTunes 7.3.2 = RAID array trouble

Dunno if any of you can help out with this but I'm at witt's end over this issue.
I have a Windows Vista box running an Abit In9-32MAX motherboard (nVidia i680 chipset), four drives in a RAID 5 array and using iTunes 7.3.2
Drivers for the motherboard are the most recent ones from the nVidia site. BIOS for motherboard is also current.
Practically ANY time I import any audio or video file over 50 MB into iTunes the entire RAID array will degrade. I'm also having issues transcoding video into Quicktime using Videora which seems to be related to this issue. The video simply refuses to play.
For what it's worth the video/audio content is legit. I own the DVD's that I'm transcoding so I can watch them when I travel.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc appreciated. I'd love to go a whole week without iTunes/Quicktime forcing me to rebuild the RAID array.

Well, whatever Itunes/quicktime does, it's definitely causing some sort of RAID compatibility. I've had this problem since I got my new rig a month ago. Nvidia 680i SLI board with a RAID 1, and I have it working fine (I've done 3 system restores now) and then I install itunes, and kablooie, there goes the RAID. I can also tell you that even if you disable the mediashield program (NVRAID.exe), it will still happen (this was my last experiment in trying to make it work) and the raid will show up degraded in the BIOS.
Basically, Apple and Nvidia need to exchange a freaking phone call and try and figure out what is causing it to go bad. from reading around, it's not just apple (though they are the biggest culprit). I've seen people mention bittorrent and some other program whose name escapes me at the moment cause this as well (digital imaging program I think).

How do i monitor the health of my Raid array?

First, I want to thank Harm, Bill, and all the countless others who continue to give great advice on this forum. My question is how to I monitor the health of my raid array and how to determine which disk is acting up. I am using a 3-disk soft raid 0 off my motherboard (gigabyte ud3p). Seems to work pretty well but occasionally has a hiccup in certain programs. I wonder if it is a sign of an impending problem or if it is just because it is a soft raid. I've tried several HD diagnostics (Crystal Disk Info, Active@, HD Tune, etc.) but aside from temperature, they don't give any info about the impending death of my raid 0. I have the SMART feature turned on in bios.
To premtively address the critics about the raid 0. I only do about one video a week and do a backup every night. So i figured it (and when) it crashes, i'll just lose a days work. The motherboard is suppose to do a raid 5 but it performed really poorly. My system is configured with additional drives (SSD boot, Raid 0 scratch, and final video) as recommended. Any advice would be appreciated.
michael

The problem with almost all raid controllers is that they do not support SMART. So that is out. With software raids you are even more limited.
With hardware raid controllers you have web based interfaces that show some basic information, like this:
but software raids do not. There are two ways to determine possible problems, at least that I know of:
1. Use drive cages with LED's for the individual drives to show activity and inspect them visually.
2. Use old-fashioned manual labour to feel vibrations, temperatures and hear clicks on individual drives.
With only 3 drives in the raid, the chances of guessing correctly are 33.3% to start with and they only increase with manual inspection. A far easier job than in the case of 6 or more disks.
Sorry I can not offer better suggestions.

RAID Array being blown away when CamCorder inserted or removed

This is a strange problem at best.
I have six external drives on my G5 in an unequal mix of FW-400 and USB. The issue is with two of the former when combined in a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array.
Both of the disks in this array (Western Digital 320GB FW-400) are of the same make and model. There are never any issues unless and until such time as I insert or remove a Sony CamCorder: the array is blown away. Gone. It does not matter if the Camera is on or off when inserted or removed. Albeit part of the chain, the Camera is attached to another device altogether via FW.
This will happen without exception each and every time.
Anyone have any ideas what's going on here?
Thanks,
Lyman

Hi Lyman;
This doesn't sound like the best designed implementation of RAID. Generally it is recommended that everything try to be kept as same as possible for the various part of the RAID array. Since the overall performance of a RAID array is determined by the slowest link which in your case would be the USB, I seriously doubt that it will have stellar performance.
What is probably happening is that the camcorder is changing the Firewire bus enough to disrupt the RAID array. I doubt that there is any way to fix this short of putting the RAID array on it's own buss using a card in one of the expansion slots. That would leave the computer's Firewire for the camcorder.
What ever you do stop using USB for RAID. USB is never going to be able to give you good enough performance to be worthwhile.
Allan

Ext2 or ext3 for large RAID array

I'm just in the process of creating a 10TB array of 5 x 2TB drives.
I've been burned too many times by EXT4 so it's out for the forseable future.
My concern is the crazy amount of time required to stabalize the file system when periodic checks are mandated. I'm using ext3 right now on a 7.5TB file system and have tuned the auto checking down to 2 years and 100 mounts. It's not the best situation but when the system goes down due to over heating (filter plugs every few months), I turn it on, and it goes into a 2 day recovery procedure during the boot process, it's outside the envelope of acceptibility.
Last edited by TomB17 (2010-06-26 02:32:55)

TomB17 wrote:
I appreciate the comments, gentlemen.
graysky wrote:Not what you asked but can you describe how you have been burnt by ext4?
I've been burned by the 0 byte file bug. The files were all there but some of them went to 0 bytes.
I did that on a backup array about 6~8 months ago. Thinking, "It's just a backup array", I tried EXT4 for the first time. It formatted up nicely, 36 hours of rsync, and I was good to go. I didn't realize I had the 0 byte file issue until my main array had some issues. When I went to the backup array, there were tons of 0 byte files, including fstab, and mdadm.conf. That made it more difficult to rebuild the main array. I did manage to rebuild the main array. Once done, I formatted the backup array EXT3 and I've been hessitante to experiment with filesystems.
The 0 byte file bug is well documented, and perhaps long solved, but I'm not ready to get back on that bandwagon.
For what it's worth, I was burned by EXT3 several times early in it's existance. That was a different issue. The whole filesystem would become corrupt after a while. It was disasterous but I didn't count on my PC then the way I do now. That was back in the days I could back up to CD-ROM. I kept at it and eventually EXT3 stabalized. These days, I trust EXT3 with my life.
I encountered very similar issues, which resulted in me switching this workstation to FreeBSD and using ZFS for my raid arrays.
The beauty of that file system far outweighs anything available on Linux at this current time.

RAID array became drive F: instead of C:

Hm... when installing Win XP new on my new system, the RAID array (which is bootable and has the op.system) became drive F: and my ZIP drive is now drive C: 8o
It wouldn't bother me too much, but some software insists on being de-compressed to C: during installation - good thing that not one of my CD-ROMs became drive C: , lol
Any way to change the drive assignment so that the array would become C: ?
On my earlier K7T266Pro2-RU, I had no such phenomenon ?(

changing it is childs play, however you cant do it.
first ill tell you how, then ill tell you why you can't.
ok, goto control panel, then administrator options, then computer management, then select Disk Management
Down on the left hand side at the bottom you should see your disks and Cd drives etc with there current letters, right click and slect new letter, but you can use a letter already in use, so the one on C or D you want to use, change first to H or whatever, then change the one thats wrong to what it should be and then change back your drive to C or D or what you want it to be.
But, why can't you change it?
Because all the root paths for windows will be pointing to F:\ and if you change to C:\ you may well find gods unholy mess on boot up. Thats if it even boots up.
Way to do this is boot PC with only CD and hard disk on, when XP is all happy make sure letters are ok, and then start adding devices and changing letters.
When all service packs and updates installed and win XP totally happy, at that point i suggest doing the activation, not before, incase something goes wrong and you need to reinstall.
hope that helped..

NAS Raid Array

I have a NAS Raid Array and when I try to set up time machine, it does not come up in the options list for storage devices. Where is it?
Thanks,
Scott

A disk image is treated by the OS as a local file. So look into how to create a growable sparse image (specify a size of 1 TB or something and if it's a sparse image the initial size will be small). This trick also works for Aperture Vaults. The caveat being that the file will be opaque to any non-Apple clients... on the NAS it will just look like a huge "block" called <name>.sparseimage. Fire up Disk Utility and search the help on creating images, or go to Apple's Knowledge Base:
http://search.info.apple.com/
And search for sparse image.
One example is here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1527.html
Note you don't have to use encryption on the image... and it's faster if you don't.
One of the main issues in using a NAS is the file system of the NAS. HFS+ supports all manner of characters in the file name. You can have spaces, and many characters which are "illegal" on Windows (NTSF || FAT32) or Linux/UNIX (UFS, EXT2, EXT3, ReiserFS) file systems. So if you try and run Time Machine over an SFP or AFP backup to a NAS that uses some other file system, you've got issues. Hence the reason not to support any NAS other than OS X Server (which is obviously running OS X and thus has HFS+).

Renaming md0 raid array

Hi, I have a raid array that was made with
mdadm --create /dev/md0 ....
but after every reboot that gets renamed to md127
installing my system on such an array worked fine, but after the first reboot, the kernel doen't find the LVM on that raid array. I am not even sure if the renaming is the problem or not.
my questions is, should the wiki for Software raid and LVM use /dev/md0 for pvcreate or should that be the symlink that is suppose to always stay the same /dev/md/name
source for renaming -> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=606481
wiki article -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/So … stallation

Problem: I install arch on a raid array, and after a few reboots, i get the error "no volume groups found"
here's my grub config file http://pastebin.com/RNVQju3K
stuff in my mkinintcopio.conf (just what i've changed)
MODULES="[b]dm_mod raid1 raid5[/b]"
HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata [b]mdadm_udev lvm2[/b] filesystems usbinput fsck"
my mdadm.conf
ARRAY /dev/md/raid_boot metadata=1.2 UUID=93fa7b5a:f6927353:0ccfa543:9915b56e name=dog:raid_boot
ARRAY /dev/md/muc metadata=1.2 UUID=f3445f73:70530dc7:8b8d64ed:f6617cd6 name=dog:muc
and i've added this line in rc.conf
USELVM="yes"
Hope this is enough to narrow down the issue. Thanks

RAID array activation issue in CS2 & XP

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