Richard Urban

I really don't see how a new raid driver, installed in Vista, would have any
affect on Win2K or Windows XP - unless you have all the operating systems
installed to the same partition.

If each O/S is in it's own partition, as it should be, there should be no
consequence of doing so.

After the raid driver has been installed, Vista will likely see the drive as
being new hardware. I have run across this. Just allow the chkdsk to
continue to termination and everything should be OK. If you have 1 large 500
gig partition, and a lot of files on that partition, it could take many
hours to do so. That is one reason for partitioning a drive into smaller
partitions. You just run chkdsk on the one that is having the problem.

If you flashed the bios of the raid card, every O/S installed on your
computer would be affected.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban MVP
Microsoft Windows Shell/User


"Bill Anderson" <billanderson601@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:J9ydnRrNx8bw8JvbnZ2dnUVZ_tmknZ2d@rcn.net...
> I'm running an Asus 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 yesterday 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, Vista's 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 rebuilt the partition and did a quick format on the drive, which is
> really two HDDs that combined with RAID give me an apparent 931 GB. 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.
> Problem? What problem?
>
> 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, from the
> day I first built the RAID array, 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.
>
> So what happened?
>
> Did the Vista Promise driver from the Vista update site set this off, or
> could its installation have been just coincidental to the problem? Has
> anyone else around here had a bad experience with the new Vista Promise
> RAID driver? Or is this kind of flakiness just something that's inherent
> in any RAID array? And especially important: Is Disk Manager trying to
> tell me something more important than I give it credit for? Anybody got
> any ideas or observations that might help me? Thanks.
>
> --
> Bill Anderson
>
> I am the Mighty Favog