Using Microsoft Windows Nt Or Windows 2000; Transparency Of Host Drives; Windows Nt; Preparing The Installation - ICP RS Series User Manual

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F. Using Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 2000
After having explained the installation of the ICP Controller and the host drives in chapters
B and C, we now explain how to install the operating systems Microsoft Windows NT and
Windows 2000.
For a successful installation, we recommend that you take a close look at the manuals
which came with your Windows NT/2000 package. The required ICP disks can be created
from the ICP System CDROM.
F.1 Transparency of Host Drives
The structure of the Host Drives, which have been installed with ICPCON (in chapter C), is
not known to Windows. I.e., the operating system does not recognize that a given Host
Drive consists of a number of hard disks forming a disk array. To Windows, this Host Drive
simply appears as one single hard disk with the capacity of the disk array. This complete
transparency represents the easiest way to operate disk arrays under Windows; neither
Windows nor the PCI computer need to be involved in the administration of these complex
disk array configurations.
F.2 Windows NT
Your ICP Controller may be operated in all operating system variants, the Windows NT
Workstation variant, the Windows NT Small Business Server variant and the Windows NT
Enterprise Edition variant. The ICP Controller is integrated into the Windows NT operating
system through the GDTX.SYS driver which is the same for all Windows NT variants.
For some ICP Controllers there is a special and optional firmware available (Cluster
RAIDYNE®), which allows the setup and operation of Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS).
For further information on ICP Clustering, check our website or contact us directly.
F.2.1 Preparing the Installation
The following steps have to be carried out and/or checked before you can begin with the
installation of Windows NT.
Step 1 - Create an ICP Windows NT driver disk.
You need a 3.5" HD formatted floppy disk. Create from the ICP System CDROM the ICP
Windows NT driver disk (you can copy file by file or write an image). If you copy file by file
do not use the Explorer, because it may not copy all files from the ICP System CDROM.
If you intend to install Windows NT 3.50 on your system, please observe the following: The
ICP driver for NT 3.50 is located in the subdirectory DRIVERS of the ICP Windows NT driver
disk. Its name is GDTX350.SYS. This file has to be renamed into GDTX.SYS and copied into
the root-directory of the ICP Windows NT driver disk.
Step 2 – Disable the Delayed Write Cache of the ICP Controller.
When you do a warm boot by simultaneously pressing the CTRL+ALT+DEL keys, some PCI
motherboards carry out a hard reset of the PCI bus. As a consequence, all expansion cards
and devices that are connected to the PCI bus, including the ICP Controller, are reset. Dur-
ing the installation procedure of Windows NT this anomaly can cause the contents of the
ICP cache RAM to be deleted before the data can be written to the disk(s). If this happens,
the installation cannot be completed correctly. Such a warm boot automatically takes place
after a FAT partition is converted into an NTFS partition at the end of the Windows NT in-
stallation procedure.