Topic: Help with Hard Drives (Solved)

[imcintyre]

This is probably pretty basic but I have searched here and on internet and I can't get a straight answer. I have a home server using sme server 7 running on a P3 866 Mhz with 384 Meg of ram. I thought it would be a good idea to have some redundancy for my 120 Gb hard drive and wanted to install another drive. Then I thought, since drives are so cheap now, use 2 drives 200 Gb each and they will be identical for Raid purposes.

It seems I thought too much and now have two $60. paper weights.

Will SME server 7 support large drives?
It seems that any of the downloads/bios updates that will allow the system to run under Windows with large drives are O/S dependent which doesn't seem useful. Any ideas.?
What is the least off the shelf system that will support 200Gb drives without screwing around? How would I be able to tell?

Thx in advance for your help.

[Daniel B.]

It's not a SME issue, more probably a problem with the jumper (master/slave) or something like that. My personnal server is an old 650MHz athlon with 384 Mo and it's running with 3hd without problem:
- 10 Go for the system
- 80 Go for the backups
- 250 Go for the data (mounted as /home/e-smith/files)
I'm planning to add another 250Go.

On more recent hardware, I've already install 250, 300 and 400 Go hd without any problem
(even a system with 1,2 To with 4 300 Go hd !!)

[imcintyre]

Thx for quick reply.

Did you have to update bios or anything else?

 I have the P3 which is a compaq and taking your previous advice bought about a test server.

The test server is a P3 celeron with 667 mhz and 256 Mb and XP service pack 2. It has a 15gb hard drive. Before installing SEM SErver7, I tried the bigger drive out. When I put the 200 gb drive in the slave position, it does not see it. When I put in a 13G drive it sees both. Both jumper sets are on cable select.

Ian

[byte]

Moving this topic to the SME Server 7.x forum, it is more appropriate there. Thanks!

[boss_hog]

Hi Ian,
three different ideas come to mind.
1) At boot go into the BIOS and check if the HDD is listed --->even if it is
incorrectly identified<----.

Thx for quick reply.

Did you have to update bios or anything else?

 I have the P3 which is a compaq and taking your previous advice bought about a test server.

The test server is a P3 celeron with 667 mhz and 256 Mb and XP service pack 2. It has a 15gb hard drive. Before installing SEM SErver7, I tried the bigger drive out. When I put the 200 gb drive in the slave position, it does not see it. When I put in a 13G drive it sees both. Both jumper sets are on cable select.

Ian

2) Some new drives have an extra jumper to "fool" the older BIOS'es, does your new drive have this feature/extra jumper???

3) My experiences show the linux installer is very "smart". On some older hardware with big drives, I just leave the BIOS set for *Auto* and *LBA*.
Linux will usually poll the drive on its own to check the size. In my limited tests of this, even when the BIOS failed, Linux saw the proper size of the drive.

If the BIOS recognizes the drive try using an linux LiveCD to test other options.
Good luck.
Joe

[christian]

I'm running twin 300GB disks on a 1GHz Duron with 7.1.
Before that I had 6.x running on the same Duron with 120GB drives.

I'm slightly surprised the BIOS is getting in the way but don't enough about the 2.6 based kernel to comment intelligently.

If the BIOS is getting in the way, you may find a separate IDE card plugged into the PCI bus may help. eg. a Promise133 card. That's what I used when I had a an issue with an older mother board and BIOS in a Windows envronment.

[imcintyre]

I forgot to mention that the first install I did about a year ago on my "real" home server showed a 300 gb drive as 120 so I returned it and have used a 120 Gb happily ever since.

I looked into our work server which is running sme v6 and it is using 120Gb drives so I thought the problem was outside SME.

I put the 200 gb drive in, ran the SME SErver install, and received something similar to the "blue screen of death".

I geth through the format, to package installation.
1st time
<0>Fatal Exception: panic in 5 seconds
Kernal panic - not syncing: Fatal Exception

I looked through the bios and the disk is correctly identified.
I tried a reinstall and this time got unusual text formatting on the screen, e.g. as if the text justimfication was messed up and was telling me that it was okay to reboot.

I tried again and got " and error installig python-2.3.4-14.2. This can indicate media failure, lack of disk space and/or hardware problems. This is a fatal error ad install will be aborted"

Any other suggestions?

[boss_hog]

Ian,
try disabling any USB options in the BIOS and try the install again.
Also search here and in the Bugzilla as there have been many hardware issues identified.
USB and Media Bay's seem to cause a whole host of little problems during install. But, they will usually work after the system has finished its set-up.
Joe

[rob]

Ian
Just a wild stab in the dark here but you said you have both drives set to cable select.
Are you using the original ide cable and was your original HD (im assuming single) set to cable select or master?

Rob

[imcintyre]

I am trying to install with only one disk of 200Gb size.

I was checking my install CD every time and the last time it failed the check. I downloaded 7.1 (previous I was using 7.0)

Everything ran fine until "error installing vim-common-6.3.046-0.40E.7. This can indicate mdia failur, lack of disk space, and/or hardware problems"

I will try again with a smaller disk to see if perhaps disk is no good.

[imcintyre]

I tried with a smaller drive and that did not solve the problem. The install seems to be failing at various points, all during the actual install. Same problem as before just during a different point.

The new CD that I burned of 7.1 on my XP machine intermittently failed the media test. Before I burned it, I did an MD5 checksum. I burned one at 24x and one at 4x using write and test. Both wrote successfully, but the 24x failed   the media test during install, as had my original V7.0 disk.

Anyhow I will look at replacing the CD drive unless someone else can see something.

[Gaston94]

Hi,
this looks close to a defective memory board : try running the memtest at the installer prompt.

G.

[pfloor]

Common problems:

Did you check the CD before you tried the installation?
Bad memory - Have you run memtest?
Bad cables - Are you using good NEW 80 wire IDE cables? (this one has stung me twice).
Bad CDROM drive - Try a different one. (and this one has bit me I don't know how many times).
Don't use cable select.  Ever.

[Mike]

Ian,

Just a quick observation/question ...

In your second post you said that the jumpers on the drive were ...

Both jumper sets are on cable select.

That's a very unusual setting for IDE drives in a PC that are usually set up as Master/Slave on a single ribbon, or Master/Master if you're using two ribbons (the preferred solution).

It may be that the old hardware that you have there is somewhat unusual (I do recall something funny about the way Compaq did things back then) but if it's not then having cable select set on a standard cable would probably cause the disk drives to misbehave themselves ...

[imcintyre]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I will have something to do this weekend

Mike said:

It may be that the old hardware that you have there is somewhat unusual (I do recall something funny about the way Compaq did things back then) but if it's not then having cable select set on a standard cable would probably cause the disk drives to misbehave themselves ...

The compaq has the master on a single cable and the slave on a cable shared with the cd drive. I did not try to install with two drives in place just the single and used cable select as I hoped that would not cause a conflict. I will try on master.

Pfloor said:

Common problems:
Did you check the CD before you tried the installation?
Bad memory - Have you run memtest?
Bad cables - Are you using good NEW 80 wire IDE cables? (this one has stung me twice).
Bad CDROM drive - Try a different one. (and this one has bit me I don't know how many times).
Don't use cable select. Ever.

I tested the CD itself as the first step in the install. The disc would pass and then I would try to install. The install would fail and I would reconfigure and try again. That is how I found that the disk would intermittently fail.
Re memtest, I was previously running XP service pack 2 on this machine without known problems.
Re cables. I tried a new cable that came with the disk but the old one had worked so I went back to it.
I will replace CD rom this weekend
Will avoid cable select in future

Gaston94 said:

this looks close to a defective memory board : try running the memtest at the installer prompt.

The last install I did, the mem test comes up later than I can get in the install. As above it seemed to work fine with XP SP2, but I will keep this in mind after CD drive replacement.

Thanks again, I appreciate the help and will let you know results.