New 1.5terabyte hard drive not recognised by server 2003

[dyson38]

I have just bought a 1.5 terabyte hard drive to replace the 250gb in our Dell SC420 server. The drive is recognised in the bios and clearly shows the drive ID and capacity as 1.5T, however when I boot into windows server 2003 they are not in the device manager, or disk management. I have changed the jumpers to reduce the speed to 150 but still no luck. was thinking of buy a new raid PCI card to see if that works

 

any ideas?

[Mcshammer_dj]

how new is the server. I seem to remember reading that DEll have got new servers setup to only work with Dell supplied disks

[dyson38]

Its about 3 years old, the disk i took out was a seagate and ive replced it with the same make but larger

[teejay]

Drive blocking waas introduced by Dell on the H series raid controllers, so that won't be affecting this.

1.5Tb drives are not supported on a lot of servers or require a a bios update, so make sure you have the latest bios and any firmware updates on the server.

[Arthur]

I seem to remember reading that Dell have got new servers setup to only work with Dell supplied disks

Drive blocking waas introduced by Dell on the H series raid controllers, so that won't be affecting this.

That's not quite true. Dell reversed their decision because it a lot of customers complained. Using your own drives is perfectly fine, but Dell obviously won't support them.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/54489-dell-perc-controllers-accept-non-dell-drives-again.html#post496592

[SYNACK]

Drive blocking waas introduced by Dell on the H series raid controllers, so that won't be affecting this.

1.5Tb drives are not supported on a lot of servers or require a a bios update, so make sure you have the latest bios and any firmware updates on the server.

 

Unless you have the firmware from that time still on the controller, I would recommend a BIOS and RAID controller firmware update along with updating the windows drivers to the latest versions. Assuming hotswap you may also want to rescan for disks inside the Disk managment snapin just to double check that it has looked for new disks.

[dyson38]

Interesting...Spent the last couple of days trouble shooting this, thought I'd try a new 500Gb drive to see if it could see that (im connecting it to the second SATA port, with the original 250gb o/s drive on the first) the o/s boots fine but still I do not see the second 500gb drive so I tried a 160gb drive (original drives were 250gb) surely it would see this but NO its still not there. I can only guess that I need to install some kind of driver for any new hard drive installed. The bios see's all the drives and they all appear in the raid config CTRL (A) but win ser 2003 see's none of them...this has got me stumped !

 

do the drives need to be partitioned/formatted first? (Ive never done that before, windows simply shows the drive initialisation wizard or I do it manually from the disk management tools)

 

I'm thinking I may have to install both 1.5tb drives sycronize them (raid 1 mirror) in the raid configuration then install windows 2k3 pressing F6 to install sata drivers, this presents a major problem for me (if it works) as I wanted to transfer a ghost image of the original 250gb drive so I dont have to reconfigure the 100's of users and all the 100's of software titles and scripts which is pretty much impossible unless I take a fortnight off!

 

what can I try next?

[SYNACK]

If you have a RAID controller in there and have not setup the new disks with a RAID level they will not be shown to Windows as the RAID controller does not know what to do with them. You must set them up in the RAID configuration utility with whatever RAID you want on them IE RAID1 for mirroring then they should show up in Windows Disk Manager.

[sted]

even if its a single disk the raid software may require you to config it as an array of 1 drive before windows will see it as the controller wont have a logical drive associated with the physical drive

[dyson38]

Thanks for your advice...I put in the 2 500gb drives and went through the timely excercise of creating the array (took 6 hours) symantec ghost could then see the drives and I dropped the image no problem booted up and hey presto perfect!!

 

Now im gonna try the 1.5tb drives have done exactly the same thing started building the array at 8am this morning its now 6:30pm and its up to 80% lets hope that symantec sees them after this.

[dyson38]

Just thought Id do an update on this problem...I got the server to recognise both the 1.5tb drives by creating the raid array (it took 32 hours to complete!) unfortunately symantec ghostcast could see the drive but came back with the error Drive too small! eh! its massive!...so I removed drive 0 and placed it into my XP desktop and did a drive to drive clone using the free seagate diskwizard, this worked like a charm, but when I put it back into the server the the O/S continuously rebooted. I switched off raid in the bios and all booted up fine. So now ive got two JBOD 1.5tb disks, ive lost RAID1 and cannot see a way of getting it back (dynamic wouldnt work, the option is there but it does nothing when I click it on the C: drive, but works on the second drive...strange)

 

not the end of the world as I have a second server thats replicating the first and a NAS backing up all the data and system state, so i guess I 90% sorted the problem just lost RAID 1