As you may know, I’ve been having a bit of a problem getting my long awaited file server up and running that I ordered months ago. It was a fairly continuous theme through posts like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one and this one.
I finally got it out and plugged everything back in again (sort of, not know really what needed to be plugged back in internally, I thought it all was but apparently not) and turned it back on to come up with the age old problem of verifying the DMI pool data.
I go into the BIOS and reset the settings to fail-safe defaults. This time when I try to boot it records an update success on the verifying DMI pool data moves onto the next line, which is blank and leaves the cursor to blink indefinitely.
Having given up on the motherboard I started looking around for alternatives. I start browsing around but have to ignore most models because they simply don’t have any specification. You would think basic things like what ports a motherboard had would be included. Apparently not. How am I supposed to work out which motherboard I want if all there is, is a BS paragraph uptalking the company?
Having abandoned CCL’s website I head over to eBuyer in hope of better specifications. There is some improvement and I decide to do a little more research on one specific motherboard. I head over to Asus’s website which causes an error every other page that can for some reason be solved by refreshing several times until it works. As usual the product name on the retailer website doesn’t match the one given by the manufacturer so you just have to guess which models match up to which names.
I finally find what I think the specification I want is which mentions RAID support, hurray! However, it seems to suggest it only supports them on two ports. Yes, suggests, it doesn’t go as far as to make it clear but it says “support is provided by x and x” which I take to mean support is not provided from the other ports. Which would also explain why you can do RAID 0 or 1 but not 5.
Having done some researching around, it doesn’t look like there is a solution. Basically, from what I can see, all of the RAID options require a driver. This is utterly retarded as it means you have to install an OS and install the driver before you can use RAID. So how do you install your OS on a RAID configuration? The answer apparently, is that you don’t.
However, I’m not even sure about this. The Intel documentation for one of it’s RAID cards that I was reading explains how to install the driver when installing Windows which suggests that you may be able to do it then. Why, why, why is this so complicated?
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 10:32 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.