Anyone using an SAS drive as their main Boot Drive?

How did you get it to work?

I have a single Fujitsu MBA3300 15K RPM SAS hard drive that I'd like to use as the main boot drive for Vista64. I have been able to load the Marvell SAS drivers, and windows sees (formatted) the drive when I boot Vista from my old sata drive that is currently the boot drive. If I unplug the sata drive and boot off the CD, Vista can’t see the drive till I manually load the Marvell SAS drivers from a USB flash drive. Once they are loaded the SAS drive shows up as an available drive to install to but when I highlight it and click next I get an error telling me that it could not create a system partition. I try formatting from the same window but it makes no difference. Is there any BIOS setting that needs to be changed so that this disk will be recognized as a viable disk and windows will install to it? During POST I see the SAS controller initialize and it shows the drive attached. If i boot from the Sata drive and then try to run the installer the disk shows up but tells me that I need to install the SAS driver. I do that but it tells me the same thing when I select the drive again as if I had not installed the driver.

Thanks

FWIW this is an Asus P6T deluxe Motherboard with and 2.66 GHz Intel i7 6gig ram.

found this on another forum hope it helps you

Posted:2/12/2009 12:49:00 PM # 10 Greetings Everyone…

I felt compelled to join the forum (as I have a couple now) to share what worked for me with my install of Vista 64 Ultimate on an ASUS P6T with SAS & SATA drives – I was struggling as a few others, but with the help of all you generous posters, I finally got my setup complete.

Mobo: Asus P6T Deluxe (Marvell Controllers)
Ram: 12GB Corsair
Drives: Seagate SAS 15k 300GB Cheetah (x2) and 1 Seagate SATA 7200 1TB
CPU: Intel i7

Ok, as a few others’ I was having a devil of a time setting up my system to boot from 1 SAS drive (where I Installed Vista and my Adobe Suite) , use the 2nd SAS drive for data, and my working “project” files – and finally, my SATA drive for short term backup and older “finished” files. (Footnote, I use a Drobo for my data mirror – imo, superior to any raid setup)

In the Marvell SAS controller / disk setup (Ctrl-M on system start) make sure no raid is setup, drives should simply read as “FREE”

Now in the BIOS – set SATA to IDE (I left it enhanced).

Listed my hard disk drives as SAS, SAS then SATA (using the drive model numbers of course)

Boot devices I set my SAS drives to #1 and #3 (although that #3 was likely unnecessary, I figured why not). The #2 boot device is of course my DVD drive. I have no installed floppy.

Then put Vista install DVD in the drive and reboot. Now the first time I did this, the install went blue screen after the initial status bar finished. I ended up leaving everything where it was and simply restarted my pc. This time the install began. Finally reached the point where the installer asks which drive to install to. All that was displayed was my SATA drive – BUT note the option to install a driver. Check it, grab your ASUS P6T support DVD – eject Vista installer – put in ASUS DVD – click browse on the installer menu – find the Marvell drivers under RAID in the AMD folder – choose it! The drivers are installed in a second or two – the SAS drives will now be found and available.

Once Vista is installed and setup, check device manager – all 3 disks (in this particular arrangement) should be listed (they won’t be available for windows use just yet).

Now in windows, go to Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. Right click (for one) on the drives to initialize, then again to format.

Done! (with apologies if my sequence isn’t exact, writing from memory – scary prospect.)

I hope this helps somebody out there – and thanks again to all you generous and kind people who post and reply to those looking for help – you’re a great bunch!

Rock On!

Doug

Edit

Thanks. That was helpful. I posted the question and now there is additional info on the Asus forum as well.

here's the link:

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum- How do you setup an SAS Boot Drive?

I post this incase someone comes here looking to solve the same problems.