Cannot get FastTrack/33 to install properly.

[Dr Mordrid]

I think Frankie G may have a point here.

I'd do the FDISK /MBR (to wipe the master boot record) then install the drives unpartitioned and without the EZDISK software. Like Frankie said this kind of software (Maxtor calls it MaxBlast) is only for systems that don't support LBA drive access. All modern systems do.

Dr. Mordrid

[Patrick]

I stayed away from the computer most of today so that I could retain my sanity, but there was one good bit of news. Promise responded to my request for an updated bios chip and they're sending me version 1.20 of the bios. I was surprised that it was version 1.20 because I thought version 1.08 was the latest. I wonder if there could be something screwy with the bios chip that's currently on this FastTrack? Although I've had this card for awhile, I've never installed it before (as if no one could tell ). Well, I guess in a week or two I'll have a new bios for it anyway.

Frankie, I wish I had never heard of this EZ-Bios utility that's on the WD Data Lifeguard Tools floppy. It reported that the bios wasn't capable of dealing with the Expert drives. It didn't say which bios. I knew that the Asus bios had no trouble handling these drives (without the FastTrack), so I thought it meant that the bios on the FastTrack couldn't handle the two Experts. And as I reported in my last post, it turns out that this damn EZ-Bios is now not only installed on the Expert drives, but it's also installed on my Seagate boot drive! Arrrgh!! I'll now have to find out the best way of getting this EZ-Bios removed from my Seagate drive without affecting the rest of the drive and it's contents. It's probably a simple thing to do, but then, so was installing the FastTrack.

Eric, just in case there's a problem with the IDE cables, I've also ordered two new ATA/66 cables to use with the two Expert drives. I have the Expert drives "dumbed down" to run at ATA/33 because my previous motherboard wasn't ATA/66 capable, and I've left them set up that way because of wanting to use the FastTrack/33. However, these new cables won't hurt, and if I can't get the FastTrack to work, I can dispense of it and simply use the built in ATA/66 connectors on this Asus motherboard. That should give me a little bit of a performance boost (although not nearly as much as the FastTrack could offer).

Doc, I'll try the FDISK /MBR that you and Frankie have suggested to use on the Expert drives. As I said earlier though, I'm not too sure what to do about the EZ-Bios located on the Seagate boot drive. I have to proceed with caution because I don't want to accidently erase it's contents!

Thanks again everyone, your suggestions are most appreciated. I'll keep you all informed of my progress (and disasters!). If anyone else cares to comment, please feel free to do so. The more feedback the better.

[Patrick]

Ok, I'm allowing myself one smilie face here because I think I finally got this thing working. However, I'm not sure that it's working 100%. First though, I'll mention what it took to get beyond the previously mentioned problems.

A) The two Expert drives had to have their jumpers in the Single position as opposed to Master or Slave. The Master position wouldn't work with these drives as there is only one drive on each IDE connector on the FastTrack in my arrangement.

B) Yes, I did have to use a utility program to wipe any and all info from the two drives prior to connecting them to the FastTrack. I had to individually connect the two Expert drives to the motherboard's IDE connector, use FDISK, format, open Windows, then use Norton SpeedDisk to wipe all free space. After both drives were done I connected them to the FastTrack and then again used FDISK and formatted. For some reason, the utility program on the WD Data Lifeguard Tools boot floppy refused to write zeros on the Expert drives. This is why I had to use the Norton program.

I was able to eliminate all evidence of the WD EZ-Bios utility from all drives (including the boot drive!) by using the EZ-Bios utility's own uninstall program. So far, so good, but I have a few questions that I'd really appreciate answers for if possible:

1) I was leery of using FDISK /MBR as I didn't know exactly what it was going to effect. Would I have saved a lot of time by using that procedure as opposed to what I ended up doing to wipe the drives?

2) The FastCheck Monitoring Utility refuses to install. The installation of it crashes part way through every time I try. This utility appears to be for either a Mirrored or a Striped/Mirrored array. Is this utility necessary at all with just a Striped array?

3) The array is shown as having a total size of 33.5 GB. Does this sound right taking into consideration that these are two 18 GB drives? I knew that I wouldn't get an array of 36 GB, but this seems like an awful drop!

4) I'm also interested in what speed increase I'm supposed to be getting. This is probably not the best program to be using, but I'm hoping if I mention the specs from the Norton System Information tests, that someone can tell if these drives are working to their full potential. The Logical Benchmark Cached Read is 88.4 Mbs and Cached Write is 70.7 Mbs. The Physical Benchmark is 10.8 Mbs. When I had tested ONE of the drives connected to the FastTrack, the Physical Benchmark test showed around 25 Mbs! Is there something wrong with this setup?

We've (yes we've ) made some real progress here. If anyone could answer these last few questions, I'd certainly appreciate it. Thanks.

[Patrick]

Hmmm.... I guess I'm not out of the woods just yet. I downloaded HD Tach to test out the raid and it's a no-go. I can run the test fine on my boot drive, but as soon as I try to start the test with the drives on the FastTrack, the program crashes. It's the same kind of crash that occurs when I try to install the FastCheck monitoring utility. Windows itself does not crash or lockup, but I get the infamous blue screen. Damn.

A bit late for this question perhaps, but...

It's not very clear to me what type of partition should be created when FDISK is used on the array drives. The Promise site states that a Primary Dos Partition should be created on these drives. Is that still the procedure in a situation where the array is NOT the boot drive? I created only Extended Dos Partitions on both of my array drives because there is a Primary Dos Partition on my boot drive. Did I goof up or are the Promise FastTrack installation instructions misleading?


[This message has been edited by Patrick (edited 31 October 2000).]

[Pertti]

Patrick,

"I created only Extended Dos Partitions on both of my array drives"...???
The way you have written this, makes it sound bad...

I haven't read the promise instructions for a while, but as far as I can remember, they were very misleading when I set up my first one.

The FT array is seen as one HD, and also treated as such, ie. what you can do with one physical HD, you can do with the array.

You can configure, setup, partition and format the array with as little as an MS-Dos boot-floppy (whatever windows drivers don't matter at that stage).
If you want to make sure that you don't mess anything up, make a Boot floppy (copy FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM to the boot floppy once you have it made), remove all the HD:s with information on them and boot with the floppy to do the following.

When you connect the drives into the FT, you should have no partitions on any of the disks you intend to use on the array.
You can check the partition information by connecting each of the drives to the IDE connectors on your mobo and starting FDISK.
In Fdisk, you choose the HD you want to operate on with selection "5. Change current fixed drive".
You will then be shown all the HD:s in your system, and you can select the one with a number.
Once you have selected a drive, you can see the partition information of that drive with "4. Display Partition information"
If you get anything else than "No partitions defined", you should delete all the logical drives and partitions on that drive until you will get "No Partitions defined"

NOTE!!...MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE THAT YOU ARE OPERATING ON CORRECT DRIVE...

Run FDISK /MBR to make sure that nothing was left there after the EZ-stuff.

Once you have made sure that the HD:s do not have any partitions defined, you can connect them into the FT.
Check the Jumper settings on the drives.

Start the machine and enter the FT utility to define the array.

Start FDISK, and you should now see one ~36GB drive with no partitions defined, partition that drive, primary/extended - both are fine, but you should have only one primary partition, a primary and one extended partition, or one extended partition there.
An extended partition can contain several logical drives though (if you for some reason want to do that).

Everything fine so far?

Exit FDISK, and reboot the machine.
Format the logical drive(s) on the array, and you are set.

If you were doing this with a boot floppy, connect your other HD:s and everything should be fine

[Patrick]

I don't want to shock anyone, but I think I actually have this baby running properly now. It turns out it was probably the FastTrack driver I used which was causing the problem. From the Promise website at ftp://ftp.promise.com/Controllers/IDE/FastTrak/, I had downloaded a driver called FT_D130_B42 because it had the highest number. I assumed this meant it was the latest driver. It caused me nothing but grief until I replaced it with another driver called FT33d120 which was emailed to me by Promise support. Hallelujah!!!

Just to tie up a few loose ends, the FastCheck monitoring utility loaded up fine after I changed the FastTrack driver. And the HD Tach benchmark utility was crashing because IT has a bug. I downloaded an older version and now it's fine.

Just so everyone doesn't think I'm a real dork, the reason I used FDISK to create an Extended Dos Partition on the raid array and NOT a Primary one was because I was trying to prevent the drive letters from getting changed on my boot drive. I have two partitions on it, and I wanted partition D to keep that designation. As most of you know, when a partition letter gets changed on a system drive it can screw up numerous programs. I was told a couple years ago by a computer techie to partition a second and/or third drive this way and it's worked fine when I've added drives in the past (granted, not on a FastTrack). Is there any other way to prevent the drive letters from being changed on a multi-partitioned boot drive when another drive is added? I'm not 100% convinced that what I did was wrong, but I'm content to leave the array designated as drive D for now.

Pertti, thanks very much for that very detailed report on how to FDISK and format drives which are to be used on a FastTrack. Although I did it a little differently than you described, I can certainly see the benefits of your method after all I've been through. Do you agree or disagree that I could have used one Extended Dos Partition on the array drive(s) instead of using a Primary Dos Partition (as instructed by Promise)?

HD Tach (version 2.52) reports:

Read Burst Speed_______29.1 Mb/s
Read Speed Average_____24.1 Mb/s
Random Access Time_____9.2 ms

SiSoft Sandra (version 200.7.6.49) reports:

Drive Index_________19989
Buffered Read______29 Mb/s
Sequential Read_____29 Mb/s
Random Read________6 Mb/s
Buffered Write______27 Mb/s
Sequential Write_____26 Mb/s
Random Write________7 Mb/s
Average Access Time__9 ms

Can anyone vouch for these scores? Are they acceptable results for two 18 Gb WD Expert drives on a FastTrack/33?

[Pertti]

Patrick,

Glad to hear that you got it working.

One Extended Dos partition is just fine, as I said the Promise instructions are a bit misleading, as they seem to think the FT array is going to be the only logical drive on the system

Your results look fine for a FT33.

[This message has been edited by Pertti (edited 01 November 2000).]

[Laurie]

Hi Patrick,

Never thought you were a REAL dork.
This has been one of the most educational (for me) threads of late. My FS is still sitting on my desk waiting to be installed.

Laurie

[Patrick]

As I reported in my last post, I've been in contact with Promise support and they sent me this email yesterday:

The driver that you had downloaded from our website and gave you lots of grief was mistakenly put there. We have changed it so that others wouldn't go through what you've gone through. As for creating a Primary Partition on the drive that you would like to connect to the Promise card, you don't have to create a Primary Dos Partition, you can just create another Partition if you like, but to be able to access that particular drive, that drive has to be partitioned and formatted.

So I feel like a little less of a dork now!

Pertti, thanks for letting me know that my FastTrack/33 benchmark results are acceptable.

Laurie, hope you learned something. I certainly have! (Did you ever get the email I sent you a month ago about the TRV900?)

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took the time to offer me some suggestions. It was great moral support to have people here giving me advice on the problem I was having. Thanks very much to Doc, Pertti, Frankie, and Eric.

[Laurie]

Hi Patrick,

Yes, I got your E-mail on the TRV900, thanks.
I just ran across your post about this problem on another forum that shall remain nameless. For a while there I thought you were talking to yourself. It sure helps to have gurus like the Doc et al on this site, reading and attempting to solve our problems.
BTW, Its 3:00 PM. I'm at work surfing. Have been all day long. It seems that our McAffee virus utility has itself caught a bug and crashed almost every machine(50 to 60) in the office first thing this morning ecxept the old GXpro 180's, one of which I'm on right now.

Laurie

[Dr Mordrid]

Your SANDRA scores look right in line. Welcome to the RAID world

Dr. Mordrid

[DentyCracker]

Patrick, HDTach 2.61 will not work on some machines (notably those with non-via chipsets) unless Auto-Insert Notification is turned off

[Patrick]

Denty, I'm afraid that there's other problems with HD Tach 2.61 yet to be worked out by them. Turning off Auto-Insert Notification on my system makes no difference. Version 2.52 works fine though.