How to test RAID controllers

[DustinWright]

I seem to be struggling with this.  I have an HP ML110 G5 with a SATA RAID 0 and PCDR does not see the RAID controller, what do I need to do to check that.

I have a home built server with a RAID 10 and it appears under Storage-->RAID Set I can test the four drives, but I can't see how to test the controller.

I got to try the new PE PCDR on an old Dell PowerEdge with an Adeptec RAID controller and did not see how to find it.

If it's in the manuals, please point me to where.  Great product, but I'm not getting all I can out of it.

Thanks

[fwilson]

DustinWright,

PC-Doctor is dependant on what the raid driver exposes to the program.  On the HP system it exposes the 4 drives separately and they can each be tested unfortunately there is no controller test per se for the onboard SATA RAID. If all the disks pass you should be in good shape.

As for PE testing, there is very limited capabilities in this environment.  PE is designed to be the pre boot installation environment.  Certain drivers are prevented from loading.  PCDR PE tests test only the "critical" components CPU memory standard hard disks etc.  To do low level testing on the power edge you may have to turn to DOS and an ASPI driver.  I believe these systems use a LSI controller and the aspimpt.sys driver loaded in the config.sys file would enable the SCSI disk category and allow you to test the drives and controller.  This requires modification of the boot files on the CD or USB key but will get you where you want to go.

-Fred
 

[DustinWright]

Do you have any documentation on adding drivers?

Thanks

[fwilson]

DustinWright,

Not really, there are many different DOS ASPI drivers out there for different cards, how it is done depends on the controller and driver.  It is best to find the ASPI driver and instruction on config.sys entry for the model you have.  In general though this is what a service center 7.5 for DOS config.sys file with a LSI controller would look like:

device=DOS\himem.sys /xbda
devicehigh=DOS\vdisk.sys 6144 512 128 /e
DEVICEHIGH=A:\ASPIMPT.SYS /RAID=OFF<0>
files=20
buffers=20
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
lastdrive=m
history=on,512,off

This particular "DEVICEHIGH=A:\ASPIMPT.SYS /RAID=OFF<0>" line will expose all of the drives individually for testing as opposed to One RAID volume that is presented to the OS.

-Fred