Re: P4C800-E Promise RAID problem

what happened was likely down to using winupdate for drivers, winupdate
should never be used for drivers, unless for ms specific hw
use only the hw manu drivers, obtainable from their sites, and then if it
aint broke why fix it?

"Bill Anderson" <billanderson601@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:KK2dnbXh2KXzQJjbnZ2dnUVZ_oGlnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx
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



T



.

Loading