This is getting really frustrating now :/ I bought 2 200GB Seagate 7200.7 hard drives the other day to replace a pair of 80GB Maxtors, these drives I intended to set up (like the Maxtors) in a RAID 1 setup for data security. Unfortunately upon putting the drives into the machine, hooking them up my PCI card controller (Highpoint 1520, which uses the HPT370 IDE controller chip bridged to allow S-ATA functionality), and then attempting to format the drives in windows using the XP disk management software, it refuses to format the drives properly (I get an error message saying 'the format failed to complete'). To format the drives I have had to resort to using Seagates own utility, but this proved tempermental - it would not properly format more than 1 partition. That aside, I should be able to do it within WindowsXP - I have the 'BigLBA' registry key enabled to let me use large drives with 48bit addressing, and I have SP1 installed...so basically it should work! What concerns me more than the difficulties formatting the drives are that I am unable to create a RAID 1 array - whenever I try to duplicate the data it stops at 68.5%, and then fails. The problems are so great that it seems something must be amiss with the controller - the drive once formatted and partioned (which was a struggle, had to try about 8 times) reads/writes data fine, but it is very tempermental with regards to formatting/partioning/duplicating to the other drive for RAID1. The way the RAID array won't allow itself to be created seems to indicate more than a software fault, and the 68.5% where the RAID duplication always fails just happens to be the 137GB point on the drive. The controller card will apparently support drives over 137GB in size, and it does detect them and their capacity correctly, but the problems I have had seem to indicate that the controller could have issues writing data past this 137GB point or even formatting the disk past 137GB capacity, both within the OS and at lower level (DOS). Trying different cables made no difference. Any suggestions as to what to do next? Try a different S-ATA controller? I am considering the Adaptec 1210SA to replace the Highpoint at this stage - I have always found the Highpoint somewhat temperamental, but never this bad, and I have always found Adaptecs to be pretty good.
Sounds like the S-ATA controller has gone down the pan to me Will; i'd try another and if no luck with that then RMA the drives? Good luck with it.
Cheers I'm gonna try and scav an 80GB IDE drive tomorrow from work - I'm going to try and set up the RAID 1 array from fresh, rather than by duplicating the other drive. Then using the borrowed 80GB drive I can move my data back onto the array (without another drive though I can't do this, as with 4x S-ATA ports that limits me to 4 S-ATA drives, and 2 of those are in RAID 0 to boot from so I can't use those ports, then to set up the RAID 1 the new drives need to be plugged into the other 2 ports...which leaves me no spare to plug my old S-ATA drives in to copy stuff across, so I'm gonna have to cadge an 80GB or so IDE drive from somewhere). Confusing really and rather annoying...RAID is fine when it works but its a PITA when you have no spare S-ATA ports to plug other drives into because you're running another array that you can't break If I can't get hold of one then I'll go for a new controller I think, the above is only a way to avoid the problems with duplicating the array across, but tbh theres no way I should be having problems like that unless theres something wrong with my existing controller, and a change of drivers changed nothing...
i thought that el cheapo sata cards can be had for about 10-15 pounds...thats where i would invest my effort, just to make sure that its not the controller card, as that is what it sounds like...
have you not tried creating a blank raid 1 array, without copying the data from one to the other, then formatting that array? or have i misread the thread?
