OT: Need Computer Advice About SATA and RAID

[Mr_Vindictive]

Ok, I'm hoping some of you might be able to help me out with this problem.

I recently bought a second SATA hard drive for my PC.  I already had a 40GB IDE (primary), and a 80GB SATA drive that I just used for storage.  I figured I might as well go ahead and buy another SATA drive for extra space.  I decided to go with SATA again since I was happy with the speed of other drive.

I ended up buying the exact same drive, an 80GB Hitatchi SATA drive.  A friend had one that he had recently replaced with a larger drive, and it hadn't been used but for about two weeks or so.

So, I plug in all three drives and Windows boots normally.  I go to My Computer and it shows my IDE and the SATA Primary Master but not the new drive which I have set to SATA Secondary Master.  

So, I figured I needed to reinstall the SATA driver for my motherboard which is what I had to do to get Windows to see my first SATA drive when it was originally installed.  So, I go through that process and the same thing happens.  I'm only showing two drives.

So, I unplug my IDE drive and boot with just the two SATA drives.  The SATA Primary Master has been formatted and doesn't have an OS on it.  Just music/game installations.  When I boot the computer with just the two SATA drives, it boots to Red Hat Linux which is what was installed on the new hard drive that I bought.

So, the new drive does work but I can't get Windows to see it.  

When using the SATA-RAID utility that came with my ASUS motherboard, I can see both drives.  The program picks them both up without a problem.  

I would try to setup some type of RAID for the drives to see if Windows would recognize both of them, but I am completely clueless about it.  

Here is what I know:

I could setup a JBOD raid, which is Just A Bunch Of Disks, but I'm not sure what type of effect that would have on the information that is on my SATA Master drive.

I could setup RAID 0 which is mirrored, but that would just mean that any info I put on my SATA Primary drive will be duplicated on my SATA Secondary.

Then there is RAID 1 and I have no clue as to what it does.


All I want is for Windows to see this other drive so that I can format it directly from Windows and have an extra 80GB just waiting there.  Is there some type of RAID that I can use to make both drives look like one large drive?

I feel stupid asking the question, and feel like I should already know this stuff.  I've never dealt with SATA before other than just one drive.  I'm just used to IDE.

Anyway, any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Sorry for the long post.

[trekgeezer]

Is Windows actually not seeing the hardware or are you just not getting a drive letter?

Check in Device Manager and see if the physical drive shows up there. If Windows is actually seeing the drive, then what you need to do is reformat the drive. If it has Red Hat on it, Windows will never assign it a drive letter because it doesn't recognize the file system on the drive.

You used to be able to fun fdisk at a DOS prompt and delete the non-DOS partitions. In XP you need to go to the Help and support and search for diskpart, there are instructions there on how to do a rescan to see if Windows sees the drive. Diskpart allows you to delete the current partition and then repartition the drive.

[Mr_Vindictive]

Trek,

I didn't check in Device Manager yesterday, just didn't think about it.  I know that I could without a doubt format the drive using the XP install CD but I would need a floppy with my SATA boot file on it in order to do so.  I know this because I had to borrow someone's USB floppy drive when installing XP on another SATA drive a while back.  I don't have a floppy drive in my machine since I see them as being useless........until I need it for something like this.

[trekgeezer]

Diskpart will let you do the repartitioning from within Windows.

[ulthar]

If I understand your initial post correctly, it seems that you are not wanting this second sata drive to be a boot disk.  Why do you need to format the drive with the XP install disk, or use a boot floppy?

The SATA drive I recently bought came with a CD.  I did not need it to install the drive in Linux, but the instructions include a method for installing as a data only, "second" drive in Windows.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

As for RAID 0, this is Striping not Mirroring; Mirroring is RAID1.

You don't want to do RAID0 unless you (a) are willing to lose the current data on SATA1 or (b) you backup that data first.  Creating a RAID0 will destroy existing data on either drive.

Striping uses two (or more) drives as one, much larger drive.  Disk access is in parallel, so the fundamental communication protocol is different.  RAID0 is considerably faster than a single drive of equivalent capacity.

The front-end of my cluster system uses drives in RAID0.  Disk access is much faster than with a single large disk.

Use RAID0 if you have disk I/O bottlenecks (such as heavily loaded server performance, or number crunchers that write a lot of temp data to disk....that's my application).  RAID0 would not benefit you if you use your disks for data storage that is (a) rarely hit or (b) the file sizes are small so that disk I/O is not the bottleneck.  To give an idea of the kinds of file sizes my calcs generate, temp files can be 10s of gigabytes.

RAID1, Mirroring is useful for hardware redundancy.  It gives no performance increase, no capacity increase and no protection against virus, et al infection.  It gives protection against a hdd failure.  We use this on production servers/VPN routers and the like built for our clients, and it has saved us.  If you are storing non-critical data on your disks that you backup regularly anyway and you want increased capacity, RAID1 is probably not what you want.

[Mr_Vindictive]

Ulthar,

Thanks for the info, and for clearing up the confusion about the different RAID types.

No, I don't want to install Windows onto this new drive, I just want it as a storage drive.  I was saying that I could format using the XP install disc, and then cancel the operation after the format is done.

I might set it up as RAID 0.  I don't have any bottlenecking problems but if I can't get Windows to see it correctly, that'd probably be my best bet.

[ulthar]

Windows should see it fine after formating as NTFS.  Windows cannot "see" partitions formatted in any of the Linux file system types.

It's one of those things about Windows that really bugs us folks that have to deal with interoperability issues all the time: MS acts like their stuff is the only stuff out there.  Linux can mount DOS, FAT and NTFS partitions (NTFS is read-only in Linux, but at least it CAN "see" the disk and read it).

If you don't have one, I highly recommend that you get your hands on a KNOPPIX CD.  This "live" version of Linux is an incredible tool for troubleshooting PC issues like the one you are having.  At least you can verify that the hardware is working (imagine your disk did not have Red Hat on it), etc.  Also, booting live into KNOPPIX is a great way to scan an NTFS disk for viruses if you think the system is compromised (you'd need a known good image, though) in such a way that running off the infected disk is suspect (which it really should always be).

[Mr_Vindictive]

Ulthar,

I'll certainly see about getting a copy of Knoppix.  I've never used it before.  The only Linux versions I have used are: Suse Linux, Red Hat (which I helped create a VOIP system w/), Gentoo, and Ubuntu.

Thanks for the help guys.