James Titcumb

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.

OK, a bit late off the mark, but I’ve only just got around to getting onto my blog to write about my day. So I woke up this morning, expecting to have to change my brake pads when I heard the dribbling of the gutter. I assumed it was raining, but interestingly – it was not. I looked out the window, and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. It was snowing, in April! Just a few days after Thursday, the hottest day of the year so far, it had started snowing. Brake pads were off for the time being, so I headed to Novatech and picked up the afformentioned new power supplies for my servers.

Read the rest of this entry »

So after a few furious hours of fiddling with computer components, and fixing them, I’ve finally gotten to a stage where I can relax and wait for Hannah to finish work. The current main server will eventually become a slave server to a new spangly server. There was a few hours downtime from around 6pm-9pm whilst I transferred the current server hardware to it’s new case.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I started thinking a bit more last night and I’ve started various musings now about the structure of my new home server. I’ve decided it’s going to be virtual IP-based at least (although not 100% decided!), and I know that I’ll want the DNS server to be updated etc. I’m going to write the control panel in a similar fashion to ISPConfig, the util that I currently use, but I’m going to personalise it especialy for my system. Once it’s set up and running, then I can erase the old server, and set it up as a slave server. Somewhere between doing all that, I’m going to get the RAID array working with the hotswap bay I have, which hasn’t been used in yonks. I’ll also split as equally as possible the hard drives between the two, and setup some kind of rsync for the data, and also some kind of MySQL cloning. There’s a lot of prep work and planning to do to make sure I do this right, so I’m going to start planning this weekend.

Read the rest of this entry »