P4C800-E Promise RAID problem

I'm running a P4C800-E Deluxe with 1 Gig RAM and four 500 Gig SATA WD HDDs. I have two of the drives in a RAID 0 array on the Promise controller. I am set up to boot into any of four Windows operating systems -- one Win2K, two WinXP, one Vista.

Early this morning I fired up the computer into Vista and checked email, web, etc. All was well. I also checked Windows update and saw there was a new "optional" Vista driver for the Promise controller. I installed it.

Then I decided to reboot into Win2K to run a test, and as Win2K came up I realized there was a problem. It was slow, slow to load, and then it began running CHKDSK on my K: drive -- the RAID array. What the ... ?

Win2K's CHKDSK was slow, slow, and as I sat there waiting, it occurred to me that the new Vista Promise driver might have changed something on the K: drive. I figured Vista would probably have no problem with the drive as it had (I surmised) installed something in the RAID array that only it was now able to deal with. So I rebooted into Vista.

Now Vista loaded slow, slow, and then it too began running CHKDSK on K:. What the ... ?

So I let Vista CHKDSK do its thing for oh, about an hour and a half, but after finding about 40 large sectors (or whatevers) it couldn't read and doing a repair on 10% of them, CHKDSK just froze. Nothing was going on.

So I rebooted, this time into WinXP, and sonofagun, XP loaded, though slowly. Not only did it load without starting CHKDSK, but it was pretty much usable. It would freeze for minutes at a time depending on what I was trying to do, but still I had some control.

The first thing I did was copy all the files I could off K: (the RAID array) and onto other drives. I saved a bunch of TV shows I hadn't yet viewed, some HD movies, and a few other things I really wanted. Some files took ten minutes to copy, while others copied easily. But these were big files -- copying all the Hi-Def movies took a couple of hours. And a few files refused to copy at all.

Then I used Disk Manager to delete the single partition on the RAID array. Then I did a quick format on the RAID array. Then I copied everything back. Now, after spending the better part of the day on all this, everything is working just fine -- just like it was before.

So what happened?

I'll also point out that when I look at the RAID array in Disk Manager, my "dynamic disk" (the K: RAID drive) displays a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. It says it has errors and that it's "healthy" but also "at risk." This how the drive has always looked in Disk Manager, no matter whether I'm looking at it in Win2K, WinXP, or Vista.

Now I'll confess that even though I've been running this RAID drive for six months or more now, I'm really a RAID newbie. I've muddled my way through, successfully I thought, until this morning.

Is this kind of flakiness inherent in a RAID array? Is Disk Manager trying to tell me something I don't understand? Has anyone around here had a bad experience with the new Vista RAID driver? Anybody got any ideas or observations that might help me? Thanks.

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog



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