I am new to this board. And hope to find somebody that points me in the right directorion.
I would like to revive my DFI-NF4 Ultra-D and use it as a Squeezebox server based on Windows 2003.
However, I am experiencing some problems with NVRaid. The disks installed sofar can be find below:
Disk ### Status Size
-------- ---------- -------
Disk 0 Online 234 GB PATA Boot disk
Disk 1 Online 298 GB PATA - Designated NVRaid 0
Disk 2 Online 298 GB PATA - Designated NVRaid 0
Disk 3 Online 2793 GB RAID5 disk based on a Dell PERC/5i controller...
Disk 4 Online 932 GB External disk for backup purposes while playing around...
This setup would provide me with maximum flexibility given the available hardware.
I enabled the raid option in the bios. And assigned all SATA and PATA ports to the MediaShield bios.
Except for 2 PATA ports: the one with the DVD and the one with the boot disk.
I rebooted the system and created a stripe set with the MediaShield bios. After which I rebooted the system again.
To prevent any BIOS conflict, I disabled the bios from the Dell controller.
Additionally, I flashed the LSI firmware into the controller for greater configuration flexibility.
After booting into Windows 2003 and running the device manager, I noticed that:
- Installing the customized drivers from Fernando does not bring me the MediaShield RAID console in the control panel.
- The driver version number in the device manager shows 9.99 for SATA ports and SCSI NVRAID controller
- While all are assigned to RAID, all SATA and PATA ports are still available as standalone ports
- PATA drivers are still the Microsoft version.
- The Dell RAID5 volume was present as a single "disk"
- Disk 1 and 2 where still available as standalone disks - no (striped) NVRAID volume.
- Removing the Dell controller does not change this behaviour
- The SCSI controller section contains both controllers - NVRAID and Dell PERC/5i
I would expect this:
- Installing the customized drivers from Fernando would bring me the MediaShield RAID console in the control panel.
- PATA drivers are also the Fernando version.
- No disk 1 and 2; only a NVRAID "disk"
Disk 1 and 2 are writable. I could convert them into a dynamic disk, create a striped volume with Windows disk manager. And copy data to it. Reason for NVRaid is the possibility to reduce the overhead by 10% using a basic, sector aligned volume.
Sector alignment is not possible with dynamic volumes.
I was able to do this with the RAID5 volume. And this worked as expected.
Now the questions:
1. The version 9.99 indicates that the Fernando drivers are installed successful. Right?
2. There seems to be a MediaShield BIOS version 5.6. Currently I'm using 5.5. Where can I find this newer BIOS and detailed instructions to flash that into the systemboard?
3. Are my expectations on the result correct? If yes, what could be wrong? And what can be done to fix it?
4. If my expectations are not correct, what can be expected?
Any help is really appreciated!
Grtz - Will