A Drive In A RAID 0 Volume Is Failing!!! HELP

Had my 2 300GB WD VelociRaptors drives setup in RAID 0 for just about a week now, and tonight out of the blue, my PC restarted and when logged into windows the Intel Matrix Storage Console reports that one of the drives was failing and should back up date immendiatey.



Now i got this message the very first time i set these drives up in RAID 0 with a fresh install of Vista 64, thought i just installed a wrong RAID driver in the Vista installation process or something, so formated and reinstalled Vista 64 again and all was fine up until now!

Is there anything i can to to see it it is actually a hardware or software problem?? Surely if it was hardware, it would have gave me the same error message the 2nd time i formatted and re-installed everything and not after a week??

I would run WD tools on it. I had this every week or so (you can right click on the drive to ignore it) but it turned out the disk was faulty. Both the RE3s I originally ordered were faulty

Do you mean the, Data Lifeguard tool??, this doesnt work under winodws Vista!? Is there any other tools?

So your saying it could be both of the drives that are faulty, and not just 1??

Got it working now, just had to set the compatability to Windows Xp Sp2, and it installed ok. Does tell me much though really.....

Ok the system has just spent the last hour doing a scan via the 'vertify Volume data' option with in the Matrix Storage Console, and has reported back:

-Number of vertifcation errors found: 0
-Number of blacks reassigned due to meddia errors: 0

Do you think that if i uninstalled Martix Storage Console and reinstalled it might fix this problem, as at the moment im not 100% sure if its an actual Hardware problem and not software!?

I would see if it happens again (especially if it's the same drive), it happened to me as I said I had 2 faulty drives, but I have heard of it coming up randomnly for others.

I assume it's the newest drivers from Intel?

Well this is the bootup screen i get..



Now i had thought i had gotten the latest drivers from the intel site, but at the top it has a date of 03-05-2007!? Also its listing a 'AHCI BIOS' is this correct, i though it would be under RAID?

Same version on mines IIRC (the driver you install in Windows won't update the above)

did you right click on the drive in the Matrix Storage Manager and click Mark as Normal?

No, as i wasnt sure if i did that weather it would stop informing me of any other problems!??

OP - I got exactly the same. The RAID array eventually failed as per your BIOS screen image.

Both drives are now working perfectly independently so I guess the array failed because I was overclocking and the pressure on the hardware somehow corrupted the array.

So it might not actually be the HD itself, and could be the array?? I have noticed on both drives that the SATA cable doesnt seem to click into place like on other drives, and can be pulled out with out push down the clip on the sata plug, not sure if this would cause such a problem with the array failing or not?

As if it was the actaul HD that was the problem, after i first incountered the problem and then did a format and fresh install, wouldnt i have gotten the same error again straight away, rather than it taking almost a week to re-appear again??

I had the same thing with my comp.. turned out to be the mobo.

lettuce said:

No, as i wasnt sure if i did that weather it would stop informing me of any other problems!??

Click to expand...

if it's a serial problem it will notify you again or the OS will grind to a halt and not boot (this happened to me) if it is a proper failure, whereas if it's a one off it will not come up again.

The overclocking idea sounds plausible too, I remember on my 939 setup if my Athlon was undervolted files would become corrupted. What's your vcore currently?

It's constantly warning me of it every time I boot up, it never does not show up as a error, so it's not intermitant it's constant. Since my fresh install I have not OC my CPU so is at default clock and vcore!

Ok ive wiped my 2 raptor drives, and have installed windows on my old WD drive, i have formated both the raptors within windows computer management program, and set them both to 'Simple Volumes' for the time being. As i understand it when both the drives where 'Striped Volumes' i could not scan them for SMART errors, but now i have them both set to 'Simple Volumes' i can scan them for SMART errors, is that correct??

Whats the best program to use for scan these drives?

EDIT: Just used the WD Diagnostics program, and has reported that all SMART status are noraml (PASS)...



So it MUST be the RAID array on my mobo or a driver that is causing the problem??, as it was definitely causing problems in windows, for instance i would boot the system and it would hang on the Vista loading progress bar, or when i started Vista it would say 'perparing Desktop' just as if it was the first time Vista had been run. So i cant just select the option 'Show status as Normal' within Matrix Storage Manager, and ignore it as it is causing system instabliltiy!!!

Just to quickly say I have recently had EXACTLY the same problem. So you're not on your own.

It crashed the game I was in .. and filled me with fear .. and only booted up after about 4 times of trying. I pressed 'mark as normal' (not having a clue what this means) and now everything appears back to 100% perfect. I have noticed precisely zero corrupted files.

I am 99.999% sur ethat this is purely a software problem. And 'mark as normal' is such an easy fix -- until files actually start getting corrupted, I'm just going to press that button as needed. Job done!

a. try a new cable
b. rma the disk

in 6 years, i've never seen a raid 0 disk fail, so it's not 'normal practice' for it to go **** up, unless there's a problem with a disk/cable

i've had about 5 raid 0 setups in that time btw

^don't see that as some sort of boast, it's more of a i'd look out if i were you post

Same thing happened to me just now! 2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID-0 (going on roughly 5 years old I think?)

Pressed ignore error for now, but I'm trying to make a bootable diagnostic floppy and the stupid thing keeps telling me that the write-protect tab on the disk is open (it isn't!) - same error on 4 different floppy discs. Tried the bootable ISO version and that just boots into a blank screen.

WD you SUCK at writing software

Can anyone help please?

Cheers,

Suman