Your ideas on Win2k setup for Clariion FC5600

[clarinette]

Hello to you all !

I had the joy of configuring and installing a FC5600 on a Win2k server platform. Without the collaboration of "Maultier" and "Comtec17", I could not have done it !

Now I have a good one for you guys:

I have setup the SAN to raid5 for drives 0.0 to 0.8 and HS for 0.9

When I boot Windows, the card's bios sees the SAN as a raid5 unit ( the card is an LSI Logic ) and windows detects the drive as unallocated. The first time I formatted it, the system wrote a signature of "dynamic disk" and formated it as "simple volume".

On reboot, it found inconsistencies all over the place and the drive was unusable. I rebinded everything (same method) and this time, I used the "basic disk" signature and formated with default cluster.

Looks good so far !

My question is: Should I use a different config (disk type and cluster size ) ?

Also, I do not have an SPS and I was wondering what would be the proper way to shutdown the unit without having somekind of data corruption/loss.

I have seen some examples of SPS emulation, but since this is experimental, I'm assuming that there are some commands missing.

Please note also that LSI drivers supplied on LSI's website do not work correctly with win2k; the drive don't show up.

I used the drivers pointed out to me by Comtec17 here on this site:

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=74791

I Thank everybody in advance for their ideas and input !

I'M rebooting my server now...Wish me luck ! [flush]

 

[maultier]

Without the sps you're clariion is highly vulnerable. I'd suggest getting an sps. Not only will it allow you to use caching to improve thru-put, it'll help prevent potential data loss. I found one on ebay for 50 bucks.. here's the link if you're interested.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3085942621&category=20315

If you're operating the clariion on a bbu you, then the risk is minimized but you still don't have caching available unless you use some sort of emulator

 

[clarinette]

Yes thanks !

This baby is already on my watch list ! But you need 2 !!!

I still have the consistency check problem each time I reboot.

It checks the drive and then I get the unfamous blue screen of death. Then the computer reboots and everything is fine. I suspect that the OS doesn't do a good check then tries to correct the error and after, the clariion unit corrects everything back to what it was...

I'm going to disable the autocheck feature for this drive and see what will happen !

Clarinette

 

[octorian]

I saw your previous thread, and I have one strong suggestion. Ditch that LSI FC909 card as fast as you can, in favor of something else. I had plenty of problems myself when using such a card, and they all went away when testing with a QLogic QLA2100 (I'll bet other QLogic and Emulex cards work just fine, though I'm currently using the array with JNI cards that also work fine).

 

[POPKORN]

Hello Clarinette,

Thanks for offering your help on my fc5600, the user you are looking for is spamkiller911. I believe he has several posts here including several really good ones in yahoo. I will place more questions about the fc5600 including the post with firmware once I get into serial console of it.

Thanks for the help in advance and sorry for the previous interruption in the connections as all of our previous efforts got erased.

get a hold on this guy and all of us should help together to make this thing work.


T..G....