Greg38H

Hello and thanks for reading. Just a note to say hi, this is my first post and that i think i may have found some of the answer im looking for from a previous post by the jake..... so dont say i havnt used the search b4 hand

Iv just got my new AMILO M3438 which im really pleased with but iv managed to bugger it up in record time by playing around with the RAID settings through the VIARAID tool.

I wanted to set the two 60gig hard drives as RAID 0 (strip) for fastest performance as i use the system mainly for producing music. The steps i took were:

1) Select RAID 0 in the menu
2) Select Auto as the creating method
3) Select 64k as the block size and select both disks for the array
4) Create!

The system then prompted me that one of the disks had an OS installed and asked if it was ok to precede... I ticked yes. The process took about 50 mins to complete and then restarted the machine. When windows booted-up it was only possible to see and access the master drive (the one with windows and other programs installed) which is not what i expected nor wanted. My interpretations of RAID 0 were that it allowed you to see and access both disks as normal but transferred data between the two at much quicker speeds!

Disappointed with the outcome I decided to then delete the Array and reset the two hard drives back to normal so both were visible and accessible again. I done this by selecting the ‘Split Array’ button form the menu in the VIARAID tool again. After this was done a message box appeared and said 'One of the disks in the Array holds an OS, is it ok to delete Array?'.... I foolishly clicked Yes. After this the laptop needed to restart and on reboot is where the problems lies.

It seems that when my laptop now boots-up the bios cannot detect any hard drives! It simply looks through the boot sequence (cd-rom, hd, net card etc) and then states: 'Reboot or select proper boot device'. I cannot find anything in the Bios to resolve this problem or anything from the windows disk as it does not let me boot from it due to there being no hard drive connected (apparently). The only thing I can think of is to make another array using the RAID bios tool (hit Tab on start-up) and install all software again which I don’t want to do as this would be very time consuming and im not even sure if doing this will even work.

Can anybody please give me some advice on how to enable my laptop to boot again from the hard drive before I deleted the array (if possible by not having to delete all software installed). Also could anybody give me an insight of why i couldn’t see or access my second hard drive when set to RAID 0 or is this common procedure with RAID 0? I must apologise for my ignorance when it comes to RAID, I can see now that I should have done a little home-work before clicking away

Thanks a lot
Greg

johnwill

I'm confused. You have a laptop with two hard disks in a RAID-0 configuration?

blackduck30

Hello Greg

I hate to deliver bad news but you have wiped your hard drives clean, there are programs that may be able to recover the information but if it was not reallly important I think it will be easier to just reinstall windows.

As for the Reboot or select proper boot device , all your system is telling you is you do not have a O/S installed that it can find and there are no bios tweaks that you will find to fix this unfortunatly.
I am sure you will be able to insert the windows install disk and just do a fresh install.
With your question "Also could anybody give me an insight of why i couldn’t see or access my second hard drive when set to RAID 0 or is this common procedure with RAID 0?", With Raid 0 it will combine 2 hard drives to appear as 1 single drive and the system then writes half your information to each drive , this is supposed to decrease the read times as it can get the information faster from 2 disks than 1. The downfall of this is that if 1 disk fails you loose half your information and the other half is more or less useless

Greg38H

Im not bothered about loosing any data as the laptop is new. I also assumed that i would simply need to install windows but when i insert th disk in start-up it simply states no hard drives are connected to the laptop and thus cannot install windows!! I dont understand how this could have happend as i have not touched any hardware components.

The only option i have is to make a new array in the RAID bios tool which im unsure will do anything to help me solve this problem.... sigh

crazijoe

Your problem is that WinXP cannot see the drives because it does not have the drivers for the RAID controller. First, you will need to configure your array in the BIOS. Then, as you are installing the OS, you will need to install the RAID drivers at the F6 prompt.

crazijoe

The drivers for the RAID controller drivers will need to be on a floppy disk. If your laptop does not have a floppy disk you will need to use an external USB one.

You can download the drivers here.

http://download.fujitsu-siemens.com/...F-9AFE3CABA9E4

Greg38H

Once again this problem has been down to me overseeing the obvious!

When I realised that raid had wiped my whole hard drive I thought if im going to install a fresh version of windows i might as well use the WinXp Pro cd i have instead of the WinXP Home cd that came with the laptop. What i did not realise is the WinXP Home cd had specific RAID drivers on it that related to the laptops hardware. I thought the drivers would have just been generic like the WinXP Pro cd. Common sense should have prevailed here!!

Anyway thanks for the help here…

As regards to RAID, i have been told by blackduck30 that RAID 0 combines both hard drives to appear as 1 single drive. Would this mean that my two 60gig hard drives should appear as a single 120gig hard drive or a single 60gig hard drive? I only ask because when i made the array it showed only a single 60gig hard drive but showing a 120gig hard drive would have made more sense to me as im aware that RAID 0 stripes the data across all disks i.e both 60gig hard drives. My purpose for RAID was to find a setting where I would have access to both drives and data transfer was at its highest performance as I deal with lots of high in size audio files for music production and was informed to have all my programs on one hard drive and all my samples on another and set the two to a RAID 0 array to gain the fastest transfer speeds! I can see now I may have been ill advised

Much thanks people

Greg38H

Thank also crazijoe, those drivers will come in handy for installing winXP pro.

crazijoe

Yes in a RAID 0 array of 2x60GB drives, it will show as a single 120GB drive. You could partition the 120GB out but you still have 2 partitions on a striped array that has no redundancy.
Another ideal would be to backup your critical data to a external USB HDD in case of a failure of the array.

Just a note: While a striped array is fast, it is not practical on a laptop because of the environment (shock, heat. etc.). There is more chance of HDD failure. It does make it nice for LAN parties. More portible than lugging your desktop unit around.

Greg38H

Thanks for that. I could have sworn though that my array only showed a combined size of 60gig, although i could be mistaken. Il do a bit more research, take the suggested advice and make a decision from there.

Thanks again

Greg38H

Ok iv decided to go with RAID 0 and partition it into 3 drives. As for the no redundancy, iv decided to use my 60gig video ipod like crazijoe mentioned. Think i should be pretty safe with that.

Cheers for the help, no doubt il be back on when my laptop blows up in the near future

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