I have a Areca 8port Raid card in my mac. The 4 internal drive's have had the minisas/ipass cable disconnected from the motherboard and routed to the first minisas connector on the Raid card. I also have 4 Drives in the 2 optical drive bays, these are connected via a minisas4i to sata 4 cable fan out.
This creates my raid array, I then bought another ipass/minisas cable to 4 sata fan out and connected it to the port on the motherboard, and routed all 4 sata connections to a pci back plane with 4 esata ports on the other side. I would have expected any esata drives enclosures I connect to these ports to be labeled "internal" drives. (trying to get a boot camp going). They are connected to the motherboard ports afterall. My external enclosure happens to actually be a dual drive unit with a steelvine 57xx series cheapy sata port replicator, I've connected the unit up with the intent to install bootcamp, but the drive comes up after init as a "external" disk, is this the steelvine causing this? I really expected to see any disks connected to any of the 4 ports to be internal 0/1/2/3, how should it know its not on the internal sleds?
Anyways, when I try to run the bc assistant it says you must boot from an internal disk, so I read into this that even though I think I have a disk connected to the internal connector, that since I boot from the raid array that I am going to have to install a version of OSX onto the "external" internal disk and boot from it before it will allow me to run the boot camp utility. I have reft on the system, should I just attempt to boot the windows media and go straight to the external internal drive? Hope that makes sense, anyways, I guess I'll boot from the DVD and look at the disk already labeled 'external" although like I said, I know its connected to a sata cable right off the inernal ipass/minisas, why its claiming its external I have no idea, does a esata pass through have some signature or something?
Any help would be appreciated , thanks in advance,
In hindsite, I should have just bought a raid card with all 8 ports passed to external sas connectors and kept the internal motherboard connected to the internal sleds and just built a 8 disk external raid array, but a 1600 dollars later its a little late. At least this way, all my raid is always with the box, and the bootcamp is the external disk which I will rarely use and not as critical.
John
This creates my raid array, I then bought another ipass/minisas cable to 4 sata fan out and connected it to the port on the motherboard, and routed all 4 sata connections to a pci back plane with 4 esata ports on the other side. I would have expected any esata drives enclosures I connect to these ports to be labeled "internal" drives. (trying to get a boot camp going). They are connected to the motherboard ports afterall. My external enclosure happens to actually be a dual drive unit with a steelvine 57xx series cheapy sata port replicator, I've connected the unit up with the intent to install bootcamp, but the drive comes up after init as a "external" disk, is this the steelvine causing this? I really expected to see any disks connected to any of the 4 ports to be internal 0/1/2/3, how should it know its not on the internal sleds?
Anyways, when I try to run the bc assistant it says you must boot from an internal disk, so I read into this that even though I think I have a disk connected to the internal connector, that since I boot from the raid array that I am going to have to install a version of OSX onto the "external" internal disk and boot from it before it will allow me to run the boot camp utility. I have reft on the system, should I just attempt to boot the windows media and go straight to the external internal drive? Hope that makes sense, anyways, I guess I'll boot from the DVD and look at the disk already labeled 'external" although like I said, I know its connected to a sata cable right off the inernal ipass/minisas, why its claiming its external I have no idea, does a esata pass through have some signature or something?
Any help would be appreciated , thanks in advance,
In hindsite, I should have just bought a raid card with all 8 ports passed to external sas connectors and kept the internal motherboard connected to the internal sleds and just built a 8 disk external raid array, but a 1600 dollars later its a little late. At least this way, all my raid is always with the box, and the bootcamp is the external disk which I will rarely use and not as critical.
John