I've tired low level formatting two of the disks using the Qlogic card bios facility which suceeded with no error messages. I then came back into windows and still couldn't do anything with the disks. I've tried creating a partition using both diskpart and gdisk32 but still no joy. Gdisk32 creates a partition but still windows wants to initialize the disks but can't. diskpart sits there using cpu cycles, so far for 3 hours, and doesn't seem to be doing very much.

Any ideas how I can get these drives in a usuable state?

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From: Fox, Adam [mailto:Adam.Fox@netapp.com] Sent: 25 March 2005 17:14 To: Iain Barnetson Subject: RE: reuse old NetApp shelf

You'll probably have to low-level format the drives to use 512 byte blocks. I'm guessing Windows isn't thrilled with the 520-byte blocks that NTAP uses.

-- Adam Fox adamfox@netapp.com

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From: Iain Barnetson [mailto:Iain.Barnetson@Halliburton.com] Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 11:50 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: reuse old NetApp shelf

I've got a couple of NetApp DS14 fibre disk shelves from our "old" filers that I'd like to reuse. I attached one of the shelves to a server using a Qlogic 2200 card and although Windows detected the drives correctly I couldn't partition them or anything - no specific error message just saying that it couldn't.

What I'm wondering is:

Should I use the Qlogic card facility to low level format them? Will that make them usable in Windows?

Any suggestions on how I can implement RAID with these disks other than Windows software RAID?

Regards, Iain