There are some external raid enclosures (for 2x hdd) or internal raid adapters
(within PC) like DC-5200 or DC5220 or the DC-7210 on the market.

Its for creating a raid - preferrably raid 1 - within the PC.

I thought thats a perfect solution and took the perfect working single hdd
and connected it to 2 different of such adapters as first drive. According to
manufacturer - and my usual own experience - the second drive is created
on the fly - even while using the drive as Windows system drive.

Thats even the way I work on my own PC (WinXP-32bit) - while writing
this text. Here it was also a single hdd connected directly to the pc when
I changed to the external raid box - and have every day evening a new
complete clone of my system hdd.

As said above, I use XP - and there was and is no driver necessary

The customers drive was Windows 7 - and no way - changed every
cable, changed adapters and brands - to get the drive working on the
adapters.

Again - it works perfectly directly connected to the standard sata port
of the mainboard. But when connected to the raid adapter - no way.
One or two times it started into windows - but ended in the blue screen.

But: When I started the direct connected hdd - and connected the
adapter with previously made clones - I found the partition in the
windows drive management - but "not online". I choose the hdd in
this windows feature and change to online - and was able to access
the drive.

Its out of question that it is possible to use hdd with this adapter
and to set up Windows from scratch - that is possible. But in our
daily service work - it would be nice to just use an existing hdd ->
and sell such an adapter + a 2nd mirror drive ....

Question:
Is there a difference how Win7 treates hdd or systems ? What could
cause this (strange) different behaviour ?

Thank you for comments
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Your observations are interesting

The manufacturer of the SATA RAID engines which you mention, appear to have a German language-only website, so I'm not sure how widely they are selling/supporting their products outside of the German-speaking countries... I don't have time to try translating all their website & PDF docs (my German language skills are rusty ), but I've got a few comments below, based on my experience of similar products.


Agreed - since it's an external RAID engine, then it should not have any OS-dependency. There are also some HBAs that can be configured to mirror disks in the background, again with no OS interaction (LSI 1068 chipset with certain f/w types, for example).


This seems to be a bug in the RAID product since you (and the RAID engine manufacturer) have no ability to change Windows 7 and whatever commands it sends to disks - and you know that the customer's disk (without the RAID engine) works fine with whatever SATA command sequences are sent by Win 7. The RAID engine should be able to cope with any series of SATA commands - if it can't, then IMHO that's a bug.


I wonder if that behaviour means that the mirroring process did not finish? Any diagnosis will be much easier if the RAID product you have has some kind of out-of-band access (e.g. serial port, as on RAID products / RAID HBAs that I've worked on), to monitor its progress/status etc., otherwise you can only guess at what is happening inside the RAID engine (or else try to infer more about what is happening, by using a SATA protocol analyser to watch the I/Os being sent to the "new" drive, and ideally, what commands are being received from the host at the same time.)

Personally, I hope this product does have some kind of monitoring/management utility which can run on the OS, for their RAID engine to report issues e.g. SMART failure of a disk, bad blocks, other mirroring failure, and not just an LED on the board, which could be inside the PC - otherwise one disk could be dropped from the mirror (loss of redundancy protection), without the customer/sys admin being aware of that critical situation.


As I mention above, IMHO this seems to be a bug in the RAID engine product, since your tests appear to show that it cannot cope with the commands or command sequence sent by Win 7 - but see below for another possibility.

If I was in your situation using Win 7, I would ask the RAID engine manufacturer if this is a known problem - if yes, then that is your answer. ; if no, then perhaps there is something different about your config (e.g. background process sending "unusual" command to the disk - SMART monitor perhaps?), which would allow normal Win 7 to work OK during manufacturer testing, but where something specific to your config exposes a bug in the product which the manufacturer hasn't detected.

My thought is: Why is the RAID engine manufacturer not getting lots of support calls, if their product is fundamentally incomptible with Win 7 SATA command / command sequences? What is different about your config/testing which would allow the product to work OK for other Win 7 customers?

I'll be interested if you get to the bottom of the issue.

NCQ ???

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

There are several RAID adapters that, even though they don't alter the file system itself, they setup an offset at the front of the drive in order to store some of their own adaptives. Is there any chance that the RAID controller in question is one of those? What is the model of RAID adapter that you are fighting with? Perhaps someone else has one and can try to replicate the issue.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

@fzabkar,

That's an interesting suggestion, although the OP claims the RAID adapter works (therefore using NCQ also), when not mirroring an existing disk - but instead starting "from scratch". As I mentioned earlier, if such a default Win7 feature was the trigger, the RAID adapter manufacturer should be getting complaints from all Win7 users who attempt to mirror an existing disk. I wonder whether the OP asked them, as I suggested.

@lcoughey,

FYI, the OP gave three model numbers in his original post.

@falther - any news?

Ooops! I guess that is what I get for reading and posting from my Blackberry. I didn't catch that the same controllers were being used.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

The screens on smartphones are a bit small, aren't they!

I know that a fresh install for this client is not an option, but can you do a test Win7 install with a drive connected to the RAID controller first? Then see if you have the ability to move it around, as you do with XP.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Will check that on coming weekend

Thks
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