It kind of beggars belief in this day and age that setting up raid is still an esoteric process.

Enter one Fujitsu Siemens primergy tx100 si server. Intention to install as a win 2008 server to run new eclipse library software.

First Attempt: 2008 failing to find hard drives... Realise I needed to use Fujitsu serverview suite to get the OS on.

Second Attempt: Start off with serverview. refuses to install the advanced version of the raid manager, have to use the basic one. Get 2008 on. Realise the server only has one drive. The spec was misleading. Buy another drive.

Third attempt: install new drive, attempt to setup raid in the bios. Nothing in there makes any sense, there's no obvious create raid button. Somehow make it work, it seems like it might be functioning. Apparently it's created the raid off the new blank drive and wiped out the other one.

Fourth Attempt: Start again from scratch, forget that serverview automatically reads the previous config file off the usb drive it needs and end up again with the basic raid manager. Somehow it's gotten unraided.

Fifth Attempt: Start again from scratch, wipe the usb drive first. Get everything installed. Run raid manager. despair over the fact that there's nothing in there that tells me a raid exists or doesnt. there's no 'create raid' button. Apparently the only place the word "raid" is used is in the title of the programme!

uncertain whether raid is actually running or not. 2008 server doesn't see the 2nd drive which could be a good sign.

I spent a couple of days last week watching a mac engineer install snow leopard on a new mac server, it struck me how super easy and obvious setting up the raids on there were. The only explanation is apple have copyright on easy raid setups.

Just used fog to take an image of the server and it's somehow broken it. Probably its partition resizing stuff. Anyways found some online instructions for the LSI raid util. Pretty sure its working now. Starting again from scratch. lets hope serverview doesnt mess it up again.