NP9260 / no raid floppy

Im trying to dual boot my np9260 and I have no floppy with the RAID driver on it. sigh, any good suggestions?

 

Buy a USB floppy drive, return it after your system works..

 

Either do a search for the maker of the Raid device, and see if they have one on their website or contact your Clevo Reseller and try to get one from them.

 

I have a D900 notebook with RAID

you must make a RAID floppy from the CD that they give you.

then use the USB Floppy to use it.

 

Vista can see either usb floppy, CD, or usb pen. I got the RAID driver from Clevo (thanks Wackety) I extracted all the files to the usb floppy, but it didn't like the usb drive so I burned them to CD and now I have both OS on my np9260. Raid 0 on all three drives, a partition 100/350 Vista/XP and I am currently loading up xp drivers to make the rest work.

 

Is it possible to have Raid 0 for three drives ? I think it is only possible for paired drives

 

I received my np9260 with all three drives in RAID 0. I wanted a dual boot so I put a partition in the RAID but I can now only boot to xp. I can see the VISTA drive, but it won't boot to it. Alan, from SAGER, said I might have to install XP first, then VISTA in order to have a choice which one I want to boot to. Any ideas out there? I put VISTA on first, then XP. Is there any way to make it work?
Just some tips on my system. There is only one controller and I can't RAID 0 two drives and non-raid the other. So I have to put in a partition or use all three in a non-raid.

 

You can RAID 0 with any amount of drives.

 

Maybe you can use the vista CD cd to put the vista boot loader back on the drive.. yeah VISTA to XP is bad!

 

Just a note to let you all know that I now have a dual boot Vista/XP Pro NP-9260. Works like a charm. I installed Vistabootpro (free) ( http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about88231.html) and now when I hit a no-go on Vista, I drop it on my XP drive (RAID 0) 3x160@7200 w/SLi and play away. Life is good. (er, now I have to get back to work-bye)

 

Just wanted to provide some facts that I received concerning the RAID configuration on these systems.

Donald from Powernotebooks.com was kind enough to contact a Senior Engineer from Sager to answer a question I had on the RAID configuration, since Torque apparently was told you must use all three drives in RAID 0, and I couldn't accept that as an answer.

From the Sager Senior Engineer:
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You can do raid 0 with 2 or 3 drives,

If you only want to raid 0 with 2 drives out of the 3 drives it can be any 2 out of the 3, long as the size and rotation match, or else it will be using the smaller and slower drive setting up the pair. The non raided drive can be any size doesn’t have to match.

But keep in mind that the SATA controller has to be placed in RAID mode, in order to raid the 2 drives. So the 3rd drive will still be ran as a standalone drive under the RAID controller using RAID drivers. But it will be stand along.

You can also change the boot order of Raided pair or standalone in the BIOS.
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Hope that this information is useful those those of you whom wish to have 2+1 RAID configurations in their systems so that they can use Vista / XP / Linux on the single drive, or just use the single drive as extra storage / backup outside of the array.

Thanks again to Donald of Powernotebooks.com and his Senior Engineering contact that shared the information.

 

I received a follow up email from the folks at PowerNotebooks.com on behalf of the Senior Engineer from Sager. Thanks to Donald and our nameless engineer for really taking an extra effort to help us out.

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“Update:

I did some double checking, and it appears that what I explained before was with a few BIOS release back. In order to fix a few issues the newer BIOS made changes. (when added VT Enable / Disable Option in BIOS)

The function to Select BOOT Drive between 2X HDD using RAID and the standalone is now not available in the newer BIOS version. You are still able to RAID0 any 2 out of 3 drive and still have a standalone drive.

Boot sector will be stored on to SATA01, so you may have to order the HDD location a bit.

Example:
SATA01 = 200GB 7200
SATA02 = 200GB 7200
SATA03 = 250GB 5400

If you RAID0 SATA01 + SATA02 you would have 400GB as HDD0 and 250GB as HDD1, during HDD selection installing Windows Vista or windows XP.

You can still select SATA03 as your installation drive, but OS will format both HDD0 (SATA01 + SATA02) and store the boot sectors here, with the user files on to SATA03

Under installed OS you would have C: 250GB, D: 400GB. But now you can’t format both drives as the SYSTEM file is on C and boot sector on D both would be protected by the OS as SYSTEM Drive. Anything else would function normally.

But any 3 drives failing would make the OS not bootable.

So in this case, you would rearrange the HDD to the following
SATA01 = 250GB 5400
SATA02 = 200GB 7200
SATA03 = 200GB 7200

RAID0 SATA02 + SATA03

This will create HDD0 (SATA01) and HDD1 (SATA02 + SATA03) for the OS therefore allowing both Boot Sector and system files be stored on to SATA01. Giving you a true 400GB Data Drive that you can format or rearrange as you wish.

I will talk to Clevo to see why the option for selecting the BOOT order of the stand alone drive has been removed, and if would be possible to be restored on next BIOS release.”

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If anyone needs help figuring out how to do this setup, please let me know and I'll do what I can.

Another Huge thanks to both the PowerNotebooks crew and Clevo for giving us this above and beyond fact-finding.

 

I just want to know when clevo will offer the bios upgrade to stop the Raid delay with Raid 5. They are aware of the Raid problems and should be working on an upgrade to the bios.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2090712&postcount=9
Check that post by PowerNotebooks. (It's in your other thread)

In my lifetime problems like you describe sound like a poorly created array. Have you tried destroying the array and rebuilding?

 

I won't get my D901C until next week, I'm going on information that PCMicroworks gave me. This issue appears to be with the Hitachi 7k200's and since PCMicro is the only reseller to offer that drive atm (to the best of my knowledge) they have been the only ones to encounter it. (Yay for me!) They said that Clevo (not Sager) was aware and that a fix for the bios should be available next month. Apparently they go through Clevo to buy and not Sager.
As also posted in the other thread.

 

Hitachi might have tried to do something magic with their I/O interfaces then, which puts them just slightly out of sync with the RAID controller card on the D900C.

As already stated, if this was a "universal" issue, clevo wouldn't be shipping these machines yet.

~~~Just remember, Hitachi bought out IBM's deskstar and travelstar line of drives years ago... Back when the deskstar had a nickname of "DeathStar" for it's horrible track record. Something about the RPM limiter was disabled to squeeze crazy performance out of the drives and it caused the heads to break and all kinds of other stuff.. *gets chills remembering all the RMA's.*

But hey... people wanted a fast drive, so that's EXACTLY what they got! I had great luck with them personally in RAID0.. I still have a few of them running in older systems

Has your reseller perhaps tried other BIOS versions?

 

I talked to Sager and they said they knew of this issue. At least the guy that I got on the phone that spoke a bit of english did. He told me to change the drive letters when your doing the RAID setup. My reseller said they had talked to Clevo and a bios fix was supposed to be coming so that you didn't have to do that...but....

 

Who knows... Good luck with your system though..

 

HIs system is a killer, 98% maxed out... that's crazy.. how much though....:S