Raid Randomly failing?!

[staddydaddy]

So I've been running a raid 1 setup for about almost a year now with no problems at all. Last night I'm sitting at the computer watching a natural selection demo, all of a sudden my computer freezes (not to uncommon but not expect) anyways I do a hard reboot. Now usually my bios boots to the technical display of checking ram and such and not the Intel graphics, but this time it boots with the graphics so I'm wondering what's going on. Then I get a checksum error from my bios. So I go into the bios and browse through a couple of things, dont change anything and exit.

Computer then boots windows and I get a "New Hardware detected" note from windows. And now the computer is seeing my additional drive that has been running as one of the mirrors in the raid set up. Everything on the "new" drive (the one that came out of the raid array) is mirrored just like it should be.
I then rebooted and went into the bios and noticed that the raid setting was some how turned to disabled. Enabled it and exited but then, the bios boots, then the raid software, and before it boots windows, the system just restarts.


It's just like my raid up and died for some reason!


This really has me baffled guys why my drive would just suddenly come out of RAID? I'd really be impressed if someone could demistify this one.

 

[holydeadpenguins]

maybe one of your drives died

 

[staddydaddy]

nah both of them are there and you can access the files and stuff but they're seperate now. this is a real bugger

 

[sinkoman]

Maybe somebody attacked your bios.

You should leave flash protection on.

 

[furiousV]

It could have been your BIOS auto recovery or something that disabled it.

Just make sure your PSU can supply enough juice for all your devices in your case. I had to unplug a fan to get myself booting, as i would randomly get the RAID BootROM saying the RAID setup is failing.

BTW are you using RAID 0 (Striping) or RAID 1 (Mirroring).
You mentioned RAID 0 but are then talking about a mirrored drive.

 

[staddydaddy]

I wasn't sure which was which but to confirm I'm using RAID 1, mirroring. (I've changed it in the original post).

Currently my PSU is on the threshold of being able to support my system I believe. It's 330w and the requirments of my system are just about there.

Since that's the case, do you think that maybe what happened is that I was watching the demo (I had IRC running in the backgroud). One of the power to the drives cutout, it wrote something to the other drives. It then crashed and the drives were no longer identicle and Hence why I got the checksum error?

I was accually thinking about getting a new PSU the day or two before this all happened.


Baiscally my question are:

What's check sum and what would occur to produce that error?
and
How do I get my RAID array running again?

I checked for BIOS updates and the raid controller updates. Do you guys think I should download and update them right now or wait till I fix the raid?

Thanks for the support guys

 

[holydeadpenguins]

I wasn't sure which was which but to confirm I'm using RAID 1, mirroring. (I've changed it in the original post).

Currently my PSU is on the threshold of being able to support my system I believe. It's 330w and the requirments of my system are just about there.

Since that's the case, do you think that maybe what happened is that I was watching the demo (I had IRC running in the backgroud). One of the power to the drives cutout, it wrote something to the other drives. It then crashed and the drives were no longer identicle and Hence why I got the checksum error?

I was accually thinking about getting a new PSU the day or two before this all happened.


Baiscally my question are:

What's check sum and what would occur to produce that error?
and
How do I get my RAID array running again?

I checked for BIOS updates and the raid controller updates. Do you guys think I should download and update them right now or wait till I fix the raid?

Thanks for the support guys

I started wondering, cuz if raid 0 drives are separate you cant read anything on them.

 

[staddydaddy]

Yeah It's RAID 1. Anyone think what I think happen could be the problem?

 

[furiousV]

Hmmm what i'd suggest is to break the mirror, boot from each drive and somehow try and determine which drive is the more correct one. Though some corruption could be elsewhere, or things just havent mirrored.

Then re-create the mirror.

Please don't ask me how to do this, thats what you got the internet for

I've recently had both my S-ATA drives failing, yes both. Managed to get an RMA for one of th drives, which is out of warranty two weeks ago, thank god there are some nice people these days who got me an exceptional return. But I doubt im gonna run of RAID 0 again, had my fun with it, for what, 17 seconds bootup from POST (used to be 1 bar go by on windows logo, now its 3)

No real performance gain apart from windows bootup and HL2 level loading.

 

[staddydaddy]

Both seem like they're correct. I wont ask you how to re mirror but answer me this:

am I going to have to reinstall windows?

 

[furiousV]

Do you think you could provide a little more information on you system specs?
I can see your basic specs in your signature, but what RAID Controller are you using?
Is it the ICH5R or ICH6 if your using the onboard controller, seeing you have an Intel chipset?

About reinstalling windows, lets try and avoid that if possible, which should be.

You can boot up windows with RAID disabled, right
Do so, get a driver disk, install the RAID driver and then try and boot up in RAID 1.
This should come in handy. Find number 5, Intel Application Accelerator RAID edition. It is for the ICH5R southbridge by the way.
If you need help finding out more detailed system specs, visit here and download CPU-Z.

I'm sure all that needs to be done is re-mirror one drive from scratch and you should be good to go.


And why you might have frozen, are you getting any clicking? If so, I would advise you to download PowerMax from the maxtor.com website and do a Burn-In test on the hard disk, well, each. This can take a few hours, depending on how many runs you tell it to do.
Burn the CD and boot from it, its pretty much MemTest, but for hard disks.
If you'r hard disk is not a Maxtor, get the appropriate diagnostic tools

I hope this comes in useful to you.