IBM X Series 345 possible RAID issues

[Graham1982]

Hi all:

I am posting on this forum as an experienced amateur rather than someone with formal qualifications in IT infrastructure. That said I do build/repair computers and have informally managed a network previously.

I was given the above server and am experimenting with it in my house hoping to run thin clients off of it for no reason other than I can. Everything is good and I am running Server 2003 on it.
That said, of the 3 SCSI drives that are installed in the machine(they all register in the POST screens) initially only one appeared when I installed XP Pro (couldn't find Server 2003 at the time and wanted to play with it)then two have now appeared under Server 2003 install so one is missing.

I think the PCI Raid Card (IBM ServeRAID 6i+ PCI RAID Controller 13N2195) is defective as there is an LED on it that flashes and the machine will not boot past post unless it is removed - I suspect dead battery.

My question is, does this card control drives that I would add in addition to a seperate RAID box or does it also control the ones in the front of the server itself (capacity for 6). I would assume not as why would Server pick up both SCSI drives and not 1 randoml?. I am happy to buy the replacement card as these are cheap as chips on ebay. However, I don't want to ship one from the US pointlessly.

Finally, I am doing all of this as a bit of a hobby - I know that if the server was in a corporate environment it would need to be relplaced so I also know that any money spent on this machine is essentialy money down the drain. However, I am not fussed about this.

Any help you can provide would be gratefully recieved.

Thanks

Graham

 

[rclarke250]

Well, you want raid 0 to get one large drive, you can then use windows to partition that drive into smaller size chunks. But be aware, this offers no redundancy, in other words, if a drive fails, you loose everything on all three drives, no way to rebuild without a backup. Ctrl-I gets you into the firmware on the raid card, it's referred to as mini-config due to the minimal options given. You may also want serverguide. It is designed to be a starting point to setup the server, and get the OS loaded.

 

[goombawaho]

^^^ Well said.

I never recommend a RAID 0 unless you're doing something like video or audio conversions.

If you boot to the ServeRAID manager CD and destroy the RAID array, you will just have three disks to do what you want. I would then probably pull two of them out, load Windows on the one, then reinsert the others one at a time and make them extra data drives (E:, F

None of that will help you learn about arrays or logical drives though.

 

[Graham1982]

Hi:

Thanks all for the help so far - I think the last iso has provided a lot of answers and with the supplied raid manager I was able to set the discs as I liked and see what everyone was talking about on here. I will be doing a lot of video editing and hosting as well as thin client stuff mentioned above so this is what I want to do.

Also I will probably populate the other drive bays with drives later as in the UK at least eBay seems to be a very cheap source of these.

Thanks again - I understand that some of my questions may have been frustrating. Happy holidays and new year.

 

[goombawaho]

I wouldn't say frustrating, but we're trying to teach you things that "civilians" don't normally mess around with.