Raid 0 problem- Dying drives?? HELP :)

[twicksisted]

HI,

Wel I have myself a small problem with my raid setup.
- I am running four WD3200 RE16 (Western Digital 320GB Raid Edition)
- Running Raid 0 off my onboard Matrix Raid controller

Problem started about 4 days ago when I got a blue screen and reboot. Wasnt enough time to see what the error was. When the computer restarted it asked to do a diskcheck which I let it do. This time it found a whole bunch of stuff and corrected it and loaded windows fine.

Yesterday when I turned on the pc it went through the bios and instead of loading windows i got a black screen with white text something along the lines of:

The following file is either missing or invalid
C:\WINDOWS\CONFIG\SYSTEM
Please insert the windows CD and run the recovery console

Anyways I had to load up windows along with the raid driver, started the recorvery console and ran CHKDSK... this found "one or more errors" completed and I rebooted and now it works.

I have run a disk validation tool in the Intel Matrix program and it comes out 100% fine on the raid drives.

Any ideas whats going on here? is one of my drives dying? what other disc checking tools can I run?

[Agent]

Use the manufactures tools for the drive to check their mechanical fitness.

And, as always, (regardless of RAID 0 or single drives) : Backup

Do you only have the single OS installed? (XP SP2 Im assuming?)

[twicksisted]

Hi,
Yes it is Win XP SP2

You know where i can get a link to the manufacturers software for Western Digital WD3200 RE16 drives? and what tests would I be running?

[twicksisted]

aaah got it
lol being silly...

[twicksisted]

ok... the WD diagnostics Utility dosent see my drive properly becuase its raid (im assuming).. It sees it as 0GB and the drive name is garbled charachters..

I tried a boot disk with this software and it starts to load up and then just black screen. funny thing is that since i ran CHKDSK its running fine...I just dont know why this has happened twice in 4 days

Heres some more info on the problem:
In event viewer the error code is:

Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003
Error code 00008086, parameter1 00000000, parameter2 00000000, parameter3 00000000, parameter4 00000000.

Info on the Matrix Controller:
Intel ICH8R / ICH9R SATA RAID CONTROLLER

Motherboard: Asus P5K-E
operating system: Windows XP Pro 32bit SP2

[charleski]

The problem is that your hard crash left a number of broken file links which were only partially corrected by your first chkdsk and came to light later. The full chkdsk scan can take over an hour on a 500G disk.

I don't think it's evidence of failing drives, it's a consequence of crashing the system with several open file handles and pending disk operations, something that RAID0 is particularly sensitive to. If you're going to use RAID0, avoid BSODs .

[twicksisted]

hehe ok...
so i need to run a full disk check then?

will the inbuilt windows disk checker be able to run a check on C:\ while i have the operating system open or do i do it in dos?

(what is the dos command if so? )

[charleski]

R-click the system partition in explorer, select Properties->Tools->Check Now... and tick both boxes, this will schedule a scan at the next boot.

[twicksisted]

many thanks

[twicksisted]

someone suggested to me that due to my overclock ( 333fsb) my southbridge voltage could be out of whack and this could perhaps cause the issue im having.

you reckon this could be the case?
Asus P5K-E
Have the southbridge voltage set to auto as I have no clue what its supposed to be at.

[Agent]

someone suggested to me that due to my overclock ( 333fsb) my southbridge voltage could be out of whack and this could perhaps cause the issue im having.

you reckon this could be the case?
Asus P5K-E
Have the southbridge voltage set to auto as I have no clue what its supposed to be at.

Devices like the signalling to the actually drives wouldn't be affected by overclocking, as they use a separate source for their supply (they don't pull power straight from the bridge)

BUT, overclocking can cause instability, and this is a tell tale sign of it, so there is some truth in whats being said If the southbridge is unstable, it certainly can cause these issues