MediaShield RAID 5 is showing up as 760GB when the actual size is 2.7TB

partitionraid5storagewindows-server-2003

I just finished setting up Windows 2003 Server on my new server, and I started setting up a RAID 5 for it.

I have 4x1TB Hard Drives. From MediaSheild RAID Utility (at boot time) the RAID size is displayed as 2.7TB. Linux also shows it as 2.7TB. However, in Windows, everything (including Windows Disk Management as well as Windows based MediaShield utility) is reporting only 760Gb.

I already tried converting partitioning table to GUID from MBR, because I read somewhere that Windows can only handle up to 2TB MBR tables, that didn't help much. Tried searching for partitioning utilities that I could use, but couldn't find anything free. Formatted the disk as NTFS partition from within Linux, it stop showing in Windows all together, even MediaShield windows utility isn't showing at anymore.

Windows is installed on a separate 500Gb hard drive, that's setup not to support RAID.
Any ideas?

Additional info:
I just deleted the RAID completely and created a new one. After booting into Windows, I verified that there are no partitions on the disk, and changed it into GPT from DISKPART. Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing now. As you can see disk is reported as 746GB still, there is no active partitions on the disk, and it is a GPT partition table…

alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/4009c148bf.png

System specification:

  • Arima NM46X motherboard
  • Dual AMD Dual Core Opteron 2214 HE 2.2 Ghz
  • 4GB RAM
  • 4x1TB + 500GB HD
  • Running Windows Home Server SP2 (Windows 2003 Small Business Server SP2) x86

Best Answer

What happens when you create a smaller RAID volume? I had something similar when I was creating a RAID 5 for an ESX server. I had something like 4 or 5 TB of storage, but in the manager it only showed up as a few hundred GB. This was a while ago, and the details are hazy, but it was something along the lines of the fact that it only saw the remainder of the of the available space after the 2TB limit.

Try creating a RAID volume that's <= 2TB, and see if it shows up in disk manager, and report back. Also, like Romanov was asking, what SP level is your Windows installation at?

-- Yes, I know that ESX != Server 2003, but none of the other suggestions seem to have worked.

Related Topic