ICH9R Raid5 malfunction?

[idata]

Hi all.

I am experiencing the following strange problem:

I have an ASUS board with Intel X38 chipset and ICH9R controller. I have a RAID5 configuration with 3 1TB drives

(data only, the OS - XP SP3 - is on a different drive). I have added a fourth identical drive and used the Matrix

Storage Console to add the entire drive to the RAID5 volume (migration). That went smoothly, and was asked

to reboot. Again no problem there. However, the entire volume has disappeared from Explorer (there were two partitions

with corresponding drive letters on it), but does appear in Matrix Storage Console (status Normal).

At this point, I performed a Verify Volume Data, that again went smoothly but did not solve the problem.

I have performed a full backup, so I have not lost any data. Any suggestions?

[idata · Accepted solution]

There is no support for 2TB+ for XP SP3

You are also using a old version of the RAID software the newest is Rapid Storage Technology

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=19607&ProductFamily=Chipsets&ProductLine=Chipset+Software&ProductProduct=Intel®+Rapid+Storage+Technology+(Intel®+RST)&lang=eng http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=19607&ProductFamily=Chipsets&ProductLine=Chipset+Software&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+Rapid+Storage+Technology+(Intel%c2%ae+RST)&lang=eng

If needed you may use EASEUS Partition Recovery should you need to.

http://www.easeus.com/download.htm http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

Moving to Vista or 7 will not solve the problem of a partition being bigger then 2TB unless you use GPT from the start when setting up a partition.

[idata]

I thought that the problem might be that I had two partitions on the volume, so after the migration

the driver wouldn't know how to distribute the new drive/space between them. So I decided to delete

the volume and reconfigure. Prior to that, I decided it would be a good chance to upgrade to RST.

Upgrade was successful, so I used it to configure my new volume, utilizing the full space of 4x1TB drives.

At that point I - finally - got the error message that the contoller's BIOS does not support volumes over

2TB, so I configured one volume utilizing only half of the total space. It is currently at 17% of the initialization

phase (about 3 hours have passed) so it's going to be a lengthy process. Since I anticipate no problems,

I will configure the remaining 50% in the same way.

I will post an update, but it will be well through the weekend.

Thank you for your feedback.

Vassilis