gtuhl: startup IT and software development

One of the first machines we setup at the office was an Exchange server built from parts. As anyone at the office knows, I absolutely hate Exchange and one day that last Windows Server box in the company will be gone and replaced with Zimbra or something else.

The machine uses an Intel D945PSN desktop board with a fake raid raid1 across 2 Samsung SP2504C drives and runs Windows Server 2003. The fake raid is managed through either a chunk of software accessible at boot time with CTRL-I or through the Intel Matrix Storage Console once booted into Windows.

It ran nicely for 2ish years but then about 2 weeks ago one of the disks in the raid1 failed. I had a heck of a time replacing that drive and wanted to share what worked and what didn’t here. The process was complicated by the fact that it was our single Exchange server and managed all corporate email so I couldn’t be as adventurous with getting it back in order.

Things That Didn’t Work

First off, the replacement drives I ordered didn’t work as straight up simple replacements and are the source of all the difficulty. They were firmware VT100-52 and the older original drives were VT100-33. The newer drives were 100 MB smaller and thus the Intel Matrix software would not let me rebuild on to them. So we had 1 232.9 GB drive and a new 232.8 GB drive.

Next, I purchased BootItNG (which ended up being crucial to this task overall) and tried resizing the NTFS partition of the existing drive. After doing this and booting Windows back up the Intel Matrix software still saw the old drive as 232.9 GB so this didn’t work either.

Calling Intel for support did not work. They refused to assist over the phone with a “chipset issue”, and over e-mail they refused to assist because I was running Server 2003 on the desktop board and apparently this wasn’t supported. Despite my response of “The OS is not the problem, I need help with the Intel raid” and creating a new ticket where I lied and said I was using XP they never responded to me again.

Calling Samsung for support did not work. Their website did not have anything useful for this model number hard drive. I called them multiple times seeking a way to downgrade the newer drives or upgrade the older drives in terms of firmware. Eventually they had me call some Far East Services company in New Jersey whose phone system was busted (they couldn’t hear me - tried from multiple lines) and whose website was offline. I unleashing an email to some common emails (info/admin/support/technical) hoping to get a hit and despite ‘admin’ going through I got no response. I finally got Samsung to connect me to them on some other number but they then told me they only handled exchanges and Samsung would handle any firmware issues. So no luck there.

What Did Work

So I did finally get things working, and here was the sequence that worked. By no means am I guaranteeing this will work for you, proceed as your own risk. In short you must disable the existing raid volume, copy the data from your remaining original disk to the new smaller disk, then boot back into Windows and create a new raid volume.

• Go buy the BootItNG / Image For Windows combo pack or something that can accomplish the same things. It is only $50 for the combo.
• Image your drive and back it up to another machine. The odds of something going wrong are high enough.
• Shut off the machine and remove the dead hard drive.
• Boot the machine and use CTRL-I to access the Matrix ROM software.
• Reset your remaining disk to Non-Raid.
  • At this point the software will issue stern warnings and tell you it will destroy ALL data on the drive being reset. I took a gamble based off forum chatter and it turns out this was not the case FOR ME (but who knows whether it ever is true). All it did was remove the disk from the fake raid controller’s knowledge and it makes the previously mirrored drive standalone and bootable outside of the raid array.
  • If you omit this step and try to boot off of the mirrored drive while it is still in the raid volume it will not work.
• Now reboot your machine and make sure everything is happy. Windows should boot, and if you check the Intel Matrix software once booted it will now show your single drive as Non-Raid. At this point you are running on your single original disk and not using any raid volume.
• Power off your machine and insert your new 100 MB smaller hard drive.
• Boot the machine up with the BootItNG CD inserted.
• Copy the contents of the original drive to the new drive using BootItNG’s copy/paste metaphor.
• Power off your machine and remove your old disk.
• Boot the machine back up and make sure it gets all the way into Windows. We are now running on a single new disk of the smaller size. After the boot Windows will likely want to do a CHKDSK, this is fine, just let it do its thing.
• Power off the machine again and either insert the original 100 MB larger drive or another new drive and boot it back up with BootItNG.
• Delete anything on the disk you just inserted, we are preparing it for usage as the second disk in a raid 1 mirror.
• Finally, reboot again this time into Windows. It may tell you that new hardware has been detected and want to reboot AGAIN. Just let it if this is the case. Dang Windows and its constant restarts.
• Once in Windows, in the Intel Matrix software you want to select “Create a raid volume from existing Data”.
• Select the new drive that you copied your old data over to (that Windows booted off of) as the source, and the empty 2nd disk as the target.
• It will crank for awhile, but you should be in good shape now. Your machine can keep running and working while the raid creation is completing.

Summary

• All of this hassle was due to a 100 MB discrepancy in disk size. Buying bigger disks (300GB+) to make sure they exceeded the size of the originals would have worked as well and it would have been easier but that meant wasted disks, wasted space, and missing an opportunity to tinker for me.
• In raid both the model number and firmware of the drives is extremely important due to different firmwares of the same model number having varying amounts of available space.
• Buy backup drives when you buy the machine and the firmware isn’t going to be a problem.
• BootItNG is a handy program that is worth its modest price.
• Fake raid kind’ve sucks and should never be explored as an option for performance purposes. Only raid for redundancy makes any sense with it.