Harddrive on its way out.... ?

[streetster]

ok, a couple of weeks ago i decided to let my computer defrag while i slept, not a big deal as its on most of the time anyway, woke up and it had BSODed, so turned it off, went to college, came back home, powered it on, and basically some of the registry and some other windows-related stuff had been corrupted and i had to format and reinstall...

last night i ran a defrag again (tho i've ran about 5 in the past 2 weeks heh), and i woke up this morning and it had BSODed again, not to confidently, i hit the power button, and then again to power it back on... POSTs fine, loads the HPT374 raid bios thing, and tells me that one of my drives has failed, do i want to power off and check, or do something like wipe the array, so i power off, check the cabling (which is fine...), cross my fingers, hit power, POST is ok, and the raid bios finds both harddrives and realises its an array and continues to boot windows fine.

i have 2xMaxtor diamondmax9s ata133 60gb harddrives which i've had raided (striped raid) like this since i bought this motherboard (8k5a3+) which was when it came out sometime last year, and i've never had any problems with them yet, but do you think one of them is on the brink of dying? and if so, what should i replace them with, or should i just last for a while with one 60gb drive unraided, and wait til i upgrade and buy a couple of SATA harddrives and raid them....

mark

[marc_ellis]

I cant say weather the drives are about to die on you or not. I think there is some software on the maxtor webiste that can check the drive in DOS mode for errors, and will bring up a report, I think its called power max. I had to do this on one of my old maxtors a few years back.
About the raid not being picked up, i get the same problem that you have when it only picks up one of my hard drives which are also running raid 0. All i have to do is restart going into the raid bios and repair the error. My guess is that both drives have to boot at the same time as one another, if not it will see one as missing.

heres the link to that power max thingy
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm