Setting up the Z800 and Installing Windows

This will cover the process that I went through to finish tweaking the system and install windows to prepare it to replace the office workstation. I hope you can learn something new from this!

The Z800 before second DBAN run.

First think I learned was a lesson after the fact about how to properly wipe RAID drives. That is, don't try wiping them in a RAID. While by removing the original RAID data and putting it in a new array makes the old data essentially useless, its still there until its overwritten, and any randomized data written to the RAID will overwrite most of the data on the drives but some still could sneak out. The best method is to put each drive into a single RAID 0 virtual drive (assuming you can't have the RAID card pass each drive on as a single drive) and wipe each drive "individually".

The first DBAN run.

After wiping the drives I wanted to figure out what RAID I wanted to run in the system. I had 4 600GB drives on the RAID and one 600GB connected straight to the motherboard. So I went with RAID 6 for redundancy. It allows for two drive failure and 2x read speed improvement, the catch is that you lose almost 50% of your storage capacity to the parity data (sections of data that can be converted into missing data for up to two of the other drives). After setting this up I then started working on installing windows, which created some interesting challenges.

The drives in the RAID manager. You can see their individual sizes and the virtual RAID drive size.

My first plan was to install Windows to the 5th 600GB drive and use the RAID drives as data drives. Which started me down a troubleshooting path like I had yet to see... First order of business was finding the drive and making sure an operating system could see it. This is where I learned my first lesson, an SAS HDD must be plugged, and it needed to be plugged into an SAS port, not a SATA port. Once this was done I fired up the Windows installer and made it to the drive selection page and got an error I had never seen before. Widows was saying it can see the drive but it wasn't bootable and therefore couldn't install to it. Time to dig through the BIOS...

Windows spitting out the error in question.

I checked every menu I could find after not seeing the SAS controller in the boot order menu. It was turned on. Finally started to do some digging in forums, chats and IRCs with an idea that was confirmed by multiple. the SAS based RAID card was likely overriding the built in SAS controller so I wouldn't be able to boot from the 5th drive.

Boot order menu. Note the Hitachi drive and look at the edit...

Device security menu, note the SAS controller is turned on.

This made me sit back and think about the configuration that I was going to use on the system. I decided to take a different, and likely better approach. I would install Windows, which with programs and other tools being added in the future, will likely take up more than 600GB of space without setting up a special "installed programs" folder on a "data" drive, would go onto the RAID array. This would also allow for redundancy with Windows being on the RAID and the extra data and tools for the shop to be stored on the smaller 600GB drive.

After making this decision the install went on without a hich and was starting updates by the end of the day.

EDIT: While taking the photos for this post I accidentally stumbled onto the menus I needed to get the original configuration I had in mind working. So it can be done. But I wont be doing it as I am happier with the setup I decided on.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this! If you have any question or thoughts please comment!

God bless!