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Adaptec Array1000- 7880 SCSI RAID setup / 8 GB limit?

Started by Fahrvenugen, 2008.08.07, 08:10:17

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Fahrvenugen

Hi,

I have recently been trying to set up eCS (or OS/2 Warp 4 for that matter) on an older Adaptec PCI AAA-131U2 card, which shows up as an Array1000 / 7880 chipset based SCSI card.  It has hardware RAID, and I've been trying to get it to work set up with RAID-5.  the specs on the card are at:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/_eol/aaa_raid/AAA-131U2/

From what I can tell, this chipset should work with the AIC7870.add driver.  I've found references on Adaptec's website saying that this card is fully supported on OS/2 using drivers that came on the OS/2 install CD.

My difficulty is that for some reason I can't get OS/2 to recognize the full size of an array.  When I've tried with Warp 4, if the array is already configured and formatted (using the Adaptec utility and formatted with a windows 2000 or xp disc), if I try and reformat it to HPFS, then format gives me an error:

SYS0529: Not enough memory is available to run FORMAT

There is enough memory on this system, right now I've got it set up with 128 MB.

If I already have a partition set up and formatted (setting it up and formatting it with Windows 2000 / XP after having built the array using Adaptec's utility) OS/2's fdisk (the updated one that was fixed for the large disk partition sizes) can *see* that there is an NTFS partition of 34GB - the full size of the array, but format will not let me format (same error as above).  If I try and rebuild the partition with OS/2's fdisk, once I delete the partition that is there, the most it will let me create is an 8 GB partition.  If I create an 8 GB partition, I can then format it, but this is not what I want.

For further testing, I decided to just install a single 18GB SCSI drive on the card, not setting up any type of RAID array.  I still ran into the situation, the most that OS/2 will recognize is 8 GB.

I tried to get eCS to work, however eCS 1.2 MR was unable to recognize any drives.  I suspect there may be something that is not working properly with the AIC7870.ADD driver in eCS 1.2

For test purposes, I've tried both RAID-5 and RAID-1 arrays with a selection of  18.2 GB drives.  I know that everything works as it should - I've been able to successfully install Windows 2000 and XP on it, and it recognizes the full size of the array and everything seems to work.  I'm just having issues finding the correct driver for OS/2.

Does anyone have any suggestions?


Andi

Not sure which version of eCS it was, but there was at least one which comes with dummy drivers for AIC7xxx instead of the regular ones. I don't remember exactly, but I think I've installed on an IDE first, changed the driver and copied the whole partition to the scsi drive afterwards.

Maybe it's worth to check the driver on the cd.

RobertM

I have found OS/2 of any variant will not install on any of the Adaptec or IBM/Adaptec drives on any partition over (roughly) 8GB. Boot Manager (if needed) needs to be installed at the beginning of the freespace on the SCSI boot drive, followed by a boot partition of 8GB or less. I have no idea why - tried it with the latest SCSI drivers, as well as with a U160 IBM/Adaptec card (thought it might have been a factor of the old card or drivers... neither seems to be the case).

That may not be the case with you - but it has been with me for any 7800 Series Adaptec card.

OS/2 will be able to fully use the remainder of the disk/array space - to the limits of the file system support. Inotherwords:

HPFS/HPFS386 cannot exceed 64GB (I've had problems with some partitions that come close to that size... I generally use 40GB or smaller - otherwise, CHKDSK sometimes runs into issues unless you have loads of memory - which will leave you a quite unusable partition).

JFS should not run into a limit or a problem.


Neither file system cares about disk spanning or the rest (whether enabled via SCSI, or via LVM Manager)... so that shouldnt be a problem.

Formatting the boot partition to something over 8GB will throw an error during format.

Another possibility may be that the odd partition types that Windows XP uses are conflicting with what OS/2 can handle. To solve that, remove all partitions, and repartition. But that is unlikely if it does indeed start the format.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
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Fahrvenugen

Thanks for the suggestions.

I think what I'll do is try putting a plain old IDE drive into that computer and install to that, then once I get things up and running see if I can get eCS / Warp to see the SCSI RAID properly.

I'll let you all know how it goes.

Fahrvenugen

Hi,

Well, I thought I'd report back in.  I've managed to get that machine up and running, although not the way I'd like.  I never did get that Adaptec card to work properly, could never get it to recognize the full size of anything over 8 GB in OS/2.  I  tried moving over an installed image of OS/2 on to the drive, booting from an IDE drive, tried Warp 3, Warp 4, and eCS, tried a variety of SCSI drivers, different DASD and os2scsi.add drivers.  I'm at the point of saying that this card just will not work properly in OS/2.

I did find that the machine in question also had a separate (onboard) SCSI interface, based on the Symbios / LSI chipset (I had disabled this interface to see if it was maybe conflicting with the adaptec, but even with it disabled the Adaptec card would not work for me).  I decided to give this a try and was able to successfully install eCS 1.2MR, and it can see the drives I have plugged in, along with their proper sizes.  Unfortunately this SCSI interface does not have hardware RAID, so if I want to do a RAID setup (which was one of the initial things I was looking to try and do), I'll have to do it using the software drivers / option or find a different SCSI card (which is probably the best option, I much prefer hardware RAID over a software based option).

Thanks for all your help and suggestions!

RobertM

Ugh... I just remembered something... I am pretty sure there is a setting in the SCSI BIOS that may disable access over 8GB. If that's not the problem, then that is really weird... only the boot drive should need to be 8GB.

If you look online, someplace I found a SCSI RAID compatibility list for OS/2. If I can find it, I will post the info here for you.

Good luck,
Robert


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Fahrvenugen

Well, I think part of the problem is the driver.  Since my original post I've found that it is actually the IBMINT13.i13 driver (which I had in my config.sys in addition to the Adaptec driver) that was allowing me to access that particular SCSI card, not the aic7870.add driver.  In fact, for additional testing I tried REMing out the AIC driver and leaving in the IBMINT driver, could still access the hard disks (only recognized as 8 GB disks), I did the same in reverse (adding vack the AIC driver and REMing out the IBMINT driver) and could no longer see any hard drives.

I think (unless there's an update to that driver that I have been unable to find) that driver may be limited, I know it has been around for ages.

I did look through the SCSI bios, couldn't find any settings regarding HD size... 


RobertM

Hi Fahrvenugen,

That does indeed sound like the problem... and, IIRC, there may also be an option in the SCSI bios for using INT13h (that may be what it's labelled instead of anything specifically to do with disk size).

Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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