Help with mounting img on 4k cluster disk

kiemosan · Mon Feb 06, 2012 4:29 pm

Hi,

I've been using starwind free for a year or so (currently using 5.8 ) to mount a lun in to my ESX hosts to backup a VM over iSCSI from my windows box. I mount the img directly from an external USB3 disk. This has worked brilliantly until recently as i've had to purchase a new USB drive for backing up to as the old one is dead.

Now I cannot mount a lun to either ESX or Windows using this new drive. If I try to mount through windows iscsi I get error messages about CRC check when I try to initialise the disk. I suspect the problem is due to the fact this is a newer 4k sector disk and I don't seem to be able to format the drive to 512 cluster size either.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can try or am I wasting my time?

Thanks in advance,

John

Mon Feb 06, 2012 9:36 pm

Hold on for a second... Do you mean you're just hosting a bunch of .img files on your external USB 3.0 disk? Or do you mapping it AS IS with disk bridge functionality we provide?

kiemosan wrote:Hi,

I've been using starwind free for a year or so (currently using 5. to mount a lun in to my ESX hosts to backup a VM over iSCSI from my windows box. I mount the img directly from an external USB3 disk. This has worked brilliantly until recently as i've had to purchase a new USB drive for backing up to as the old one is dead.

Now I cannot mount a lun to either ESX or Windows using this new drive. If I try to mount through windows iscsi I get error messages about CRC check when I try to initialise the disk. I suspect the problem is due to the fact this is a newer 4k sector disk and I don't seem to be able to format the drive to 512 cluster size either.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can try or am I wasting my time?

Thanks in advance,

John

kiemosan · Mon Feb 06, 2012 9:50 pm

Hi,

I am hosting .img files on the new USB3 disk.

Mon Feb 06, 2012 9:57 pm

Can you read / write / copy these files with say Windows explorer? Can you name device model?

kiemosan wrote:Hi,

I am hosting .img files on the new USB3 disk.

kiemosan · Mon Feb 06, 2012 10:09 pm

Its an iomega Prestige model - http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalo ... CG8Q8wIwAQ

I can read and write files just fine to it under windows 7.

Tue Feb 07, 2012 10:46 am

OK, so it could be align issue indeed... Could you please try to mount an image with StarWind, try reading it thru iSCSI and send us StarWind log so we could make sure what's really broken? In the worst case we'll grab 4KB unit (AFAIK we've been fixing something related recently...). Thank you very much for cooperation!

kiemosan · Tue Feb 07, 2012 3:32 pm

Hi,

Have submitted my logs under Case # 00005504.

Cheers

John

Tue Feb 07, 2012 3:33 pm

Thank you! We'll take a look ASAP.

kiemosan wrote:Hi,

Have submitted my logs under Case # 00005504.

Cheers

John

Tue Feb 07, 2012 4:39 pm

John,
Please check the update from MS:
"An update that improves the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks is available"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018

Do you have this update installed?

kiemosan · Tue Feb 07, 2012 4:41 pm

No! Was not aware of that. Will install an report back ASAP.

kiemosan · Tue Feb 07, 2012 5:05 pm

I have installed the update but this has not improved anything unfortuately.

I have also submitted a new set of log files.

Thanks

John

Tue Feb 07, 2012 5:53 pm

John,

Looks like disk driver still doesn't report sector size. We'll check if this situation can be processed in other way.

You can try adding "buffering" parameter to device configuration string in starwind.cfg file as a temporary workaround:

For example, change record
<device name="ImageFile2" file="My Computer\D\test\img90.img" asyncmode="yes" CacheMode="none"/>

to:
<device name="ImageFile2" file="My Computer\D\test\img90.img" asyncmode="yes" CacheMode="none" buffering="yes"/>

And restart the service.

kiemosan · Tue Feb 07, 2012 8:27 pm

Hi Alexey,

That has got it working!

Thank you!

John

kiemosan · Wed Feb 08, 2012 9:51 am

Hi Alexey,

Just following up. Although adding the buffer in to the config for the device has got it working. Whenever I try to copy data to/from the drive my windows RAM usage goes through the roof and renders the PC unusable. Is there a way to limit the buffers ram use? I have 8GB system memory.

Thanks

kiemosan · Thu Feb 09, 2012 8:29 am

Any ideas on this anyone?