HOW TO ? Installing Clariion DAE to Windows 4

[clarinette]

Hi Guys !

It's been a while since I have played with my Clariion DPE...And anyways, it's been working erratically.

Now, I purchased 6 Clariion DAE with 9gb drives for a total of 630gb !

Don't be fooled ! I won't be using all of them !

I have replaced 10 drives with the Seagates 50gb fiber drives (model ST150176FC).

What I whant to do is connect direct my server through a QL2200 Copper-fibre on Windows 2003 OS.

I have beed trying warious configurations and it does not work. Sometimes drives show up ok in disk management, some show as "unknown drives". None of them can be formatted.

Is there something I need to do ?

What drivers/software needs to be installed?
Should the bios of the card be enabled ?
Need I to do a low level format of all the drives ?
(I tried one with the same results)

This is for one of my customer and I really need this to be resolved !

 

[comtec17]

You are not going to be able to connect a DAE or DAE2 directly to a windows server.

 

[clarinette]

Hi Comtec17 !

Please allow me to be skeptical...What I want to do ia a JBOD configuration and do a software RAID. Can you be more specific about the "can't do it".

Thanks !

 

[Chacalinc]

Disk drives in the CLARiiOn's DAE are formatted with 520 bytes per sector (low level format), you need to format them with 512 bytes per sector in order to use them directly from your windows OS.

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[clarinette]

...This is what I was going to try this morning...I read a couple of threads and this is the conclusion I came to...

I will post a follow up !

Thanks for the info !

 

[Chacalinc]

a link for this:

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/low_level_scsi.html

Chacal, Inc.

 

[clarinette]

OK ! here is the rundown for those of you that might be trying to do the same thing. I.e. installing a DAE as a JBOD or software raid on a Windows 2003 server.

HArdware used:

1 compaq ML530 server
1 LSI LOGIC FC909 HBA card
1 Clariion (SGI) DAE fibre on copper
10 50gb DISK (SEAGATE ST150176FC)
1 Cable

First, install all disks and power up DAE and verify that you do not have any amber leds (all must be green). If you do have one on the last led, this normal, the DAE is not online yet.

Also, make sure you set the proper id number on the DAE cabinet. First one should be set to 0 (zero).

Next, connect the cable from the PC to the PRI interface located on the DAE cabinet. Do not connect it to the EXT connection. If you do not redundancy or maximized througput, one cable is sufficient. You can however connect 2 cables, one on loop A and one on the B loop to two seperate interfaces. This will double your transfer speed.

Boot your PC. At this point, you will want to go to the interface's bios (ctrl-c for LSI and ctrl-Q for Qlogic). Make sure you reset the card to it's default factory values. This should be for standard operations.

Boot to the OS. In order to make this work on Windows OS, the drives need to be reformatted at the low level. Using the utility in the bios of the interface is not a good idea. It's long (for 50gb, it's 1.3 hours) and you have to do it one drive at a time. Download Seatools from Seagate. This utility program will allow you to reformat from 520bytes per sector to the more acceptable-for-windows 512bytes. All this can be done simultaneously on all 10 drives. The elapsed time will still be 1.3 hours but at least, you'll have them all reformated.

Once this is done, the OS will recognized them all as regular drives. Using Disk management console, you can format the drives as: Basic disks, stripes, volumes, raid-5 and so on...

Hope this helps others. Thanks Chacalinc who reminded me about the 520 bytes thing which I forgot about ! This makes a big difference.

Clarinette for Clariion user !

 

[Chacalinc]

Cool Clarinette, thans a lot for post your experience, this will be very usefull for other peoples!

I recommend you to put your last post in a FAQ in order to have it as General Availability (I would do it for my self, but my english is not quite good to make a decent FAQ).

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[timwah]

Excellent info Clarinette!
I just printed this one for my files.
Thanks

 

[hidden75]

I'm curious what you connect the cable from the DAE up to on your PC? and what kind of cable is this?