Going RAID without reinstalling the OS...
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I have two identical 250GB SATA hard drives in my machine that I set up in a RAID configuration when I initially got it...that was the first time I toyed with a RAID configuration, and if I remember correctly, the general steps were to set up the hardware RAID in the BIOS (the board is an ASUS A8N-E), use the F6/Load Driver option in the XP installer, and that's pretty much it. For reasons I won't get into right now (suffice it to say I've reinstalled the OS three times after Nvidia's RAID driver decided to start dying on me at random times) I had given up on the idea and have been running the pair of drives independently for a few months now. I definitely remember the disk I/O being significantly faster when the drives were RAIDed (obviously). On this machine I'd put performance above disk space, so I wanna setup the RAID configuration again (I'm gonna take a chance on newer RAID drivers). I've cleared out the second drive, and I'm not worried about backing up my data files (this is already part of my bi-monthly routine). The thing holding me back is that I don't wanna have to go through an OS reinstall--my understanding is that it should be possible to setup the driver now with the OS running, re-do the configuration in the BIOS, reboot, and let it propagate the content of the first drive onto the second...is this assumption correct? Am I missing any step?
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I have two identical 250GB SATA hard drives in my machine that I set up in a RAID configuration when I initially got it...that was the first time I toyed with a RAID configuration, and if I remember correctly, the general steps were to set up the hardware RAID in the BIOS (the board is an ASUS A8N-E), use the F6/Load Driver option in the XP installer, and that's pretty much it. For reasons I won't get into right now (suffice it to say I've reinstalled the OS three times after Nvidia's RAID driver decided to start dying on me at random times) I had given up on the idea and have been running the pair of drives independently for a few months now. I definitely remember the disk I/O being significantly faster when the drives were RAIDed (obviously). On this machine I'd put performance above disk space, so I wanna setup the RAID configuration again (I'm gonna take a chance on newer RAID drivers). I've cleared out the second drive, and I'm not worried about backing up my data files (this is already part of my bi-monthly routine). The thing holding me back is that I don't wanna have to go through an OS reinstall--my understanding is that it should be possible to setup the driver now with the OS running, re-do the configuration in the BIOS, reboot, and let it propagate the content of the first drive onto the second...is this assumption correct? Am I missing any step?
If you're lucky, the RAID controller won't screw around with the logical addressing of the bytes on the disk, and this will work. If you're unlucky, it will, and nothing will be readable. I'm assuming you're going with RAID 1 mirroring, both disks being identical. Windows can boot from drives and controllers that appear, to the BIOS, to be regular IDE drives on the regular IDE controllers. Since you mention that you needed to use F6 to load a driver last time, I suspect that won't work for you. What you should do is work out what driver you need for your controller and copy it to C:\ntbootdd.sys. Then you need to edit your boot.ini to use
scsisyntax rather thanmulti. See this KB article[^] for more information. You probably want to start by copying the existing entry in boot.ini and modifying it since you'll want to be able to retry booting with the drive connected to the regular SATA channel if the RAID doesn't work (I don't know if you need to change the physical connection to turn RAID on, it's possible that if you're already connected to the RAID controller that you already havescsisyntax in boot.ini). Otherwise I'd do a full backup, reinstall the OS and restore the backup. You'll know you've got it wrong if you get a blue screen saying ERROR_INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE during boot. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder -- modified at 12:10 Wednesday 5th July, 2006 -
If you're lucky, the RAID controller won't screw around with the logical addressing of the bytes on the disk, and this will work. If you're unlucky, it will, and nothing will be readable. I'm assuming you're going with RAID 1 mirroring, both disks being identical. Windows can boot from drives and controllers that appear, to the BIOS, to be regular IDE drives on the regular IDE controllers. Since you mention that you needed to use F6 to load a driver last time, I suspect that won't work for you. What you should do is work out what driver you need for your controller and copy it to C:\ntbootdd.sys. Then you need to edit your boot.ini to use
scsisyntax rather thanmulti. See this KB article[^] for more information. You probably want to start by copying the existing entry in boot.ini and modifying it since you'll want to be able to retry booting with the drive connected to the regular SATA channel if the RAID doesn't work (I don't know if you need to change the physical connection to turn RAID on, it's possible that if you're already connected to the RAID controller that you already havescsisyntax in boot.ini). Otherwise I'd do a full backup, reinstall the OS and restore the backup. You'll know you've got it wrong if you get a blue screen saying ERROR_INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE during boot. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder -- modified at 12:10 Wednesday 5th July, 2006> I'm assuming you're going with RAID 1 mirroring, both disks being identical. Yes. I'm looking for performance and redundancy (and no, I'm not under the impression that RAID-1 makes the drives work as backups of each other. :-) > What you should do is work out what driver you need for your controller I believe it's nvraid.sys (or something similar); I know there's another file, but can't remember its name off the top of my head. > and copy it to C:\ntbootdd.sys. That's news to me, and starts to sound :~ ... > You'll know you've got it wrong if you get a blue screen saying > ERROR_INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE during boot. :-D Based on my past experience with RAID I have no doubt it won't take me any time at all to figure out whether I did anything wrong... That's good stuff Mike; I definitely remember seeing the boot.ini file using the scsi(x) syntax--I should've kept a copy before nuking the system a zillionth time to reinstall it in a non-RAIDed configuration...Back then I decided and I didn't want anything to do with RAID for at least 6 months... Still need to muster up the courage though...
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> I'm assuming you're going with RAID 1 mirroring, both disks being identical. Yes. I'm looking for performance and redundancy (and no, I'm not under the impression that RAID-1 makes the drives work as backups of each other. :-) > What you should do is work out what driver you need for your controller I believe it's nvraid.sys (or something similar); I know there's another file, but can't remember its name off the top of my head. > and copy it to C:\ntbootdd.sys. That's news to me, and starts to sound :~ ... > You'll know you've got it wrong if you get a blue screen saying > ERROR_INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE during boot. :-D Based on my past experience with RAID I have no doubt it won't take me any time at all to figure out whether I did anything wrong... That's good stuff Mike; I definitely remember seeing the boot.ini file using the scsi(x) syntax--I should've kept a copy before nuking the system a zillionth time to reinstall it in a non-RAIDed configuration...Back then I decided and I didn't want anything to do with RAID for at least 6 months... Still need to muster up the courage though...
Daniel Desormeaux wrote:
> and copy it to C:\ntbootdd.sys. That's news to me, and starts to sound ...
Windows has to find this driver in the boot cycle before it can load the registry hives which tell it which drivers to load. Therefore it has to have a fixed name and location. I guess it's something like it wouldn't have enough memory in real mode to locate and process the registry, or simply that they wanted to keep as much code out of real mode as possible. Once it switches to 32-bit (or 64-bit on x64) protected mode it needs to know how to control the drives, which it can only do through the BIOS for the primary and secondary controllers (IDE, S-ATA, or IDE emulation for SCSI and RAID controllers). This KB article[^] says that if you have both IDE and SCSI controllers,
multisyntax only works for the IDE controllers. As far as the hardware detection is concerned, IDE/SATA RAID controllers in addition to the regular primary and secondary IDE controllers behave much like SCSI controllers. Setup can also only do BIOS/BIOS emulation access unless you feed it a driver disk. It has a number of common drivers on the Windows CD but for anything less common or released after the CD was finalised, it needs a driver floppy. Hopefully Windows Vista will be able to accept a driver on CD or on a USB key, so that this reason for needing a floppy drive is eliminated. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder