Shane Nokes

What CHKDSK was finding was bad physical sectors on the HD's.

That's a hardware fault, not an OS fault.

I'd contact the drive manufacturers for replacements.


"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