XP / Vista will not install on SAS Hard Drive

[Peter M]

... and if all else fails, you could give the "Format Unit" command in the SAS BIOS a chance. It's buried waaaaay to the right in the individual drive configuration menu. (Whether or not this actually wipes the drive is up to the drive's firmware - some do, some don't.)

[Keymaker]

How?

[Peter M]

How what?

[fuch]

fdisk returns "unable to access drive 1"

pci-emaxx only scans for ide drives.

DBAN FAQ states "dban does indeed have native drivers for most RAID implementations, but making it run can require configuration changes on the host. I cannot help if you lack enough clue to do this because I do not have hardware samples for development and testing. Send hardware if you want support for this equipment." On my present configuration dban doesn't recognize my drive. Apparently I lack the clue.

Fujitsu has a tool called SDIAG that supposedly formats and diagnoses Fujitsu SAS drives. BUT it requires a Windows environment. As soon as I can fire up windows on the new system this is the tool I'm relying on.

Thanks for all the input guys.

Edit: Peter there seems to be an issue when I try to use the sas mpt bios to format the drive. After it states "this will permanently delete" etc etc "are you sure you want to continue?" the formatting process hangs at 0%. And of course afterwords does not verify. The drive was sent to me in "tested, working condition" but ...

[Peter M]

Formatting, on a SCSI/SAS unit, is entirely internal to the drive. Host software cannot display progress ... so just be patient, very very patient. Also, there is no verify aftermath, the drive's already done all that. The SAS BIOS lets you do a full surface read test for your peace of mind, though.

[fuch]

My two new 15ks upon boot invoke the following prompt: "Warning! Foreign Metadata Detected!" So I assume they have been used.

How can I clear their metadata when the drives won't show up in my bios's topology?

[Peter M]

Find the secret "STFU and use them anyway" button Seriously, I don't have the LSI BIOS in front of me right now, so I can't look. The LSI site has the generic SAS RAID user's manual on their website, so it might be a good idea to RTFM a bit

[fuch]

Peter I appreciate the bluntness, but I don't just ask a question without exhaustively researching for an answer myself. I've read those manuals and the only time metadata is mentioned is to say that it is supported and to reserve a small amount of space on the hard disk for it, no mention of how to clear previous metadata from disks. And since my bios won't allow me to see these two new drives I believe, though I don't want to, that I'm SOL

I asked the above question because maybe you or someone else had been in this situation before and could shed some wisdom.

[Keymaker]

I think it's your name..