Well, another day, another few hundred pounds piled into my file server.
I’m now on my second motherboard, third RAID implementation, waiting for a hard drive to arrive back from CCL, second graphics card, the list goes on.
My new RAID card arrived this morning. I eventually managed to get it installed and wired up. I didn’t want to go in at first because the card was bent (physically) but I managed to get it in. I then booted into the BIOS setup to find my hard drives were registering was SATA-150.
I took them out and after some searching around was told I needed to remove the jumpers on them. Apparently Seagate ship all their hard drives set to run as SATA-150 rather than SATA-300. So I removed the jumpers and put everything back together again.
Booted it up again and created the RAID partition. Booted up into Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop via the Live CD to see what would happen if I tried to install it. It couldn’t detect any drives. So I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 Server (alternative install) and ran that but that couldn’t detect any drives either.
High Point so supply the source code so that you can compile your own drivers which is what I may end up doing. There are no instructions on how to do this though and most of the people on the Ubuntu forums generally agree that it doesn’t work with Ubuntu. It seems to want me to save it to floppy drive though. I don’t have one. Why would I?
So I could always just give in and install Windows Server 2003, that should be nice and simple right? Well, almost except according to the install instructions on my manual I need to boot into Windows Server 2003 (you know, before I’ve installed it) and run the software to burn the driver to floppy drive (which again, I don’t have).
The moral of the story is this. If you are thinking of building yourself a file server with RAID, to save yourself a lot of hassle, rather than doing it in hardware, simply write down every binary digit by hand onto a writing pad. It’s a lot easier.
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This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.