Cannot use volume, bad blocks

Donal · Sun Dec 23, 2007 1:13 am

Hi. I just installed StarWind on my file server and StarPort on my app server. I created a 1gb image file and shared it. Went to the app server and connected to it, everything peachy. Windows saw it and it shown up in disk manager. However, when it went to initalize it failed and the system log showed a ton of bad block errors.

How do I fix this?

Also, I downloaded the lowest functionality version that the site said was free, but when I launch it I get "trial version, 30 days left". Did I somehow download the wrong file or something? Thanks!

Mon Dec 24, 2007 11:27 am

Hello,
The installer is unified for all of the StarWind types.
Please reade carefylly the received e-mail and you'll find the link to the free personal licens. Please download that license and register StarWind with it.

Also please send us logs from StarWind installation directory to find a solution for bad locks error.
Thanks.

Donal · Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:22 pm

Ahh, I see the license now, thanks.

I'll email those logs, thanks again!

Tue Dec 25, 2007 1:22 pm

Got the logs from you, thank you... Checking what's wrong. Initially sounds like MS iSCSI initiator cannot get responses from the target so I/O manager decides the sector is bad. What network configuration do you have?

Donal · Tue Dec 25, 2007 3:26 pm

The two servers have gigabit nics and a crossover cable between them. The target is 10.0.1.1 and the initiator is 10.0.1.2. I also tried running it on my gig switch instead of direct crossover. I also tried running it via the regular LAN interface. I did notice that if I created the volume on the C:\ of the target, it would work fine. It's when I create it on the D:\ that it fails. D: is a RAID5 array. Does the freebie one not work with RAID?

Tue Dec 25, 2007 3:29 pm

Check you local RAID performance. And check did you initialize the image with zeros during creation. With slow writes and uninitialized image it will not work.

Donal wrote:The two servers have gigabit nics and a crossover cable between them. The target is 10.0.1.1 and the initiator is 10.0.1.2. I also tried running it on my gig switch instead of direct crossover. I also tried running it via the regular LAN interface. I did notice that if I created the volume on the C:\ of the target, it would work fine. It's when I create it on the D:\ that it fails. D: is a RAID5 array. Does the freebie one not work with RAID?

Donal · Tue Dec 25, 2007 3:56 pm

I didn't init 0 on the big file, but as I was testing I tried a 0 init'd 256mb file and it also didn't work.

here are the hd tach results for my two drives:

Drive C:, ATA 160gb single drive on mobo IDE:

Drive D:, RAID5 3 TB array using Areca ARC-1160ML2:

Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:48 pm

These are read results. And in your case the problem is writes. Having ~5MB/sec sustained transfer rate for RAID5 volume is definitely an issue. And I'd kick Areca guys to fix it BEFORE using the volume as iSCSI target storage source

Tue Jan 08, 2008 9:38 am

Any news from ARECA support ATM?