Formatting SansDigital RAID5 external USB drive

[svracer469]

I purchased a SansDigital TowerRAID TR4U+ 4 Bay external drive and installed four Seagate Barracude 3000GB sata drives. I set the external box to configure in RAID 5, downloaded the SansDigital utility for the initial RAID 5 Configuration. The SansDigital utility will see this device correctly, the Device Manager in XP will see the device in Hard Disks as H/W RAID 5 USB Drive but I cannot see this drive if I go to My Computer.
How do I reformat this drive in FAT32 so my Win XP, Ubuntu 10.04 and Xbox 360 can see this device? I have tried using Ridgecrop's fat32format utility but receive "error that it is unable to get partition info, GetLastError<>=1: Incorrect function"

 

[J_E_D_70]

Need to get to Disk Manager:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsxp/ht/disk-management-xp.htm

Think you have to make a lot of smaller partitions (don't think XP can address that much contiguous storage).

Know this is off topic, but do you have a way to back up 9TB of RAID space?

 

[svracer469]

At this point I will be moving data from an external 2TB drive to this unit, however it is completely blank at this point

 

[svracer469]

The Win XP Device manager will identify this drive is connected, but the Disk Management utility does not see this Raid drive

 

[FireWire2]

I purchased a SansDigital TowerRAID TR4U+ 4 Bay external drive and installed four Seagate Barracude 3000GB sata drives. I set the external box to configure in RAID 5, downloaded the SansDigital utility for the initial RAID 5 Configuration. The SansDigital utility will see this device correctly, the Device Manager in XP will see the device in Hard Disks as H/W RAID 5 USB Drive but I cannot see this drive if I go to My Computer.
How do I reformat this drive in FAT32 so my Win XP, Ubuntu 10.04 and Xbox 360 can see this device? I have tried using Ridgecrop's fat32format utility but receive "error that it is unable to get partition info, GetLastError<>=1: Incorrect function"

With 4x 3TB in RAID5 you have a raid volume of 9TB, which XP wont and will not able access, due to 32bit limitation...
You do have TWO options:

1_ connect this to XP64 of later OS the format it as GPT then share the volume. it slows due to network connection

2_ Get and Install this http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/gpt-loader/winXP.html

Then you can access HDD/Volume more than 2TB in your XP

 

[FireWire2]

I purchased a SansDigital TowerRAID TR4U+ 4 Bay external drive and installed four Seagate Barracude 3000GB sata drives. I set the external box to configure in RAID 5, downloaded the SansDigital utility for the initial RAID 5 Configuration. The SansDigital utility will see this device correctly, the Device Manager in XP will see the device in Hard Disks as H/W RAID 5 USB Drive but I cannot see this drive if I go to My Computer.
How do I reformat this drive in FAT32 so my Win XP, Ubuntu 10.04 and Xbox 360 can see this device? I have tried using Ridgecrop's fat32format utility but receive "error that it is unable to get partition info, GetLastError<>=1: Incorrect function"

With 4x 3TB in RAID5 you have a raid volume of 9TB, which XP wont and will not able access, due to 32bit limitation...
You do have TWO options:

1_ connect this to XP64 of later OS the format it as GPT then share the volume. it slows due to network connection

2_ Get and Install this http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/gpt-loader/winXP.html

Then you can access HDD/Volume more than 2TB in your XP

 

[svracer469]

FireWire2, Thank you for the answer! That will correct the XP issue, but what do I need to do so Ubuntu 10.04 will also see this correctly?

 

[Nothing_But_NAS]

Nothing for Ubuntu. Linux will be able to access whatever filesystem size defined. Simply mount the volume as you would any other disk.

 

[svracer469]

I can mount this 9TB drive in Ubuntu 10.04 but the system properties report this as 190GB?

 

[Nothing_But_NAS]

Run fdisk -l and list the output for the NAS device you mounted. Sounds you have a partition/format issue.

 

[svracer469]

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 9328 74927128 83 Linux
Warning: Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 9328 9730 3229065 5 Extended
Warning: Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5 9328 9730 3229065 82 Linux swap
Warning: Partition 5 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Disk /dev/sdb: 9001 GB, 9001606602240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1094383 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

sda1 is the Ubuntu 10.04 box

 

[Nothing_But_NAS]

Disk /dev/sdb: 9001 GB, 9001606602240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1094383 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

There you have it. Ubuntu is seeing all 9TB. Sounds like your FAT32 is not able to see the full disk. I can't help with WinXP or Xbox but if you want to format it in Ubuntu run "mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb". That will delete everything on the current drive and create an ext4 partition. You can serve up the disk over your network from Ubuntu using CIFS. Search for CIFS for details on how to set that up.

**Edit** Make sure you umount /dev/sdb before running mkfs

 

[svracer469]

Best answer selected by svracer469.