An issue thats been annoying me a little over the last few days was trying to get my nVidia nForce RAID array working. I’d taken 4x 300GB hard disks out of one of my servers as I wanted to keep them. Initially I tried to set up the array using my shiny Adaptec 2410SA. Alas, on a brief check, Adaptec don’t have Vista drivers. I tried hacking it a bit, but didn’t get it to work.
I gave up on that and tried setting up the array using the onboard RAID device… which actually makes more sense as it’ll probably be a lot faster and efficient than using a PCI RAID device. Anyway, I enabled RAID in the BIOS, set up the array in the nForce BIOS, and it was happy and existing as a nice big striped 1.2TB (!) array. Then it came to Vista, and the annoyance began.
The array appeared in Disk Manager as four seperate drives. My first instinct was to reinstall or upgrade drivers. I tried re-installing, to no avail. Having no internet meant I had to go round a friends house and download the latest nForce drivers (and get exceedingly drunk in the process…). I installed these, and still the same result. I did a lot of Googling, and some people recommended upgrading the BIOS. I managed to get my mobile phone to connect my PC to the internet just long enough to get on the ABit site and download the latest BIOS. No difference…
I tried various hacks that were suggested, and I finally gave in and posted on the nVidia forums. A bloke called Fernando responded telling me that the latest nForce drivers (15.17) didn’t support nForce 4 for RAID. Nice one, nVidia. This guy has obviously done a lot of work on this issue as he’s actually made a driver pack (even WHQL’ed!) for nForce 4 systems that worked straight off. If anyone has any issues at all with nForce 4 boards, I highly recommend installing this driver pack at the first instance. I am now happy with my 1.2TB hard drive… now I just need to fill it!
More detail, and the download links can be found here.
And lastly, thanks to Fernando for putting the effort in and making the solution so simple.
