andy

Rule of thumb: Do not install any hardware drivers from Windows
update.

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:39:33 -0400, Bill Anderson
<billanderson601@yahoo.com> wrote:

>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.