Imminent System Failure.

Oberon

Oberon

Oberon

Associate
Joined
27 Jul 2004
Posts
544
Location
Milton Keynes
Hi guys,

Just had a real computer scare and I want to avert a total disaster from happening. I was just doing a raid on WoW today and my computer locked up in the middle of it. I decided to restart, however the computer initially couldn't detect the raid volume. I rebooted again and that time it was fine.

However, the Intel Rapid Storage driver software detected some errors on my raid setup and claims that both disks have failed (despite working fine again). Here's a screenshot of what I am seeing.

http://tinypic.com/r/5esjrl/7

I would really appreciate some advice on what to do and also I ask if anyone else has experienced a the same or similar problem.

For now I'm going to backup all my important files, update my motherboard BIOS and try some new IRS drivers/software and see if that helps out.

PC spec is shown in my sig below, my hard drives are two Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB drives in a RAID 0 setup.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate any feedback/help.
 
Back up all your data, take them out of the RAID array, and scan both HDD's for errors. If it comes back clean, then put them back in RAID 0 and see if you continue to get any problems.
 
Well it's just gone down the bog. The computer crashed on the desktop and now it will not boot windows and will BSOD just after the windows logo at startup. I didn't even get a chance to backup. The windows recovery tool won't let me restore to a previous state nor can it detect the actual problem. I'm going to try what you have suggested Jordan, I'll get back to you on that soon.

I've also just done some reading on my motherboard. Something about a B3 revision and Cougar Point turned up? Not sure if this is the case. The motherboard has been acting up with detecting my drives lately, though they were ok it seemed. I got the P8P67 LE a week after release in January so I am certain that mine is the first release version. I'm going to switch over to the Grey 6Gbs ports for the mean time.

I'll see if I can recover my files using recuva or something. I'll also update the bios via the flash tool in the BIOS.
 
Oberon said:
Well it's just gone down the bog. The computer crashed on the desktop and now it will not boot windows and will BSOD just after the windows logo at startup. I didn't even get a chance to backup. The windows recovery tool won't let me restore to a previous state nor can it detect the actual problem. I'm going to try what you have suggested Jordan, I'll get back to you on that soon.

I've also just done some reading on my motherboard. Something about a B3 revision and Cougar Point turned up? Not sure if this is the case. The motherboard has been acting up with detecting my drives lately, though they were ok it seemed. I got the P8P67 LE a week after release in January so I am certain that mine is the first release version. I'm going to switch over to the Grey 6Gbs ports for the mean time.

I'll see if I can recover my files using recuva or something. I'll also update the bios via the flash tool in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

You should have swapped the motherboard to the B3 revision when you had the chance.

The "fault" of the early B2 boards was possible failure of the Intel SATA 2 ports so you were just asking for trouble.

If you're lucky the RAID might still be recognised if you plug the drives into the Intel SATA 3 ports as the B2 failure shouldn't cause damage to the drives only to the ports.
 
Surveyor said:
You should have swapped the motherboard to the B3 revision when you had the chance.

The "fault" of the early B2 boards was possible failure of the Intel SATA 2 ports so you were just asking for trouble.

If you're lucky the RAID might still be recognised if you plug the drives into the Intel SATA 3 ports as the B2 failure shouldn't cause damage to the drives only to the ports.
Click to expand...

I was never aware of this issue until now as I have never had any problems until this week. I've updated the BIOS to the latest version, 1013 I believe and I have now switched both hard drives to the SATA 6Gbs ports.

However the Intel raid config tool reaffirms that there has been an error on the drives, exactly the same error that is. It can detect the raid volume however and says that its fine.

I'll see if I can boot in safe mode or something.
 
Well I can categorically say, the computer is dead...ish. I can't tell if its the hard-drives which have reported errors but are actually detected, has a valid volume and will attempt to boot windows. It could be the motherboard, though it seems fine. Thirdly, it could mean that my windows file system is broken. The only other option now is to find the disc I used to install Windows 7 and see if I can recover my OS and files through that.

I'll give OC'uk a ring tomorrow and see if they can RMA the board and/or maybe the hard-drives for me.
 
Ok, I decided to lay off calling OCuk about the Motherboard/HDD's. Instead I opted to boot Ubuntu from a live CD. Couldn't get access to the contents of the array however and accepted I could not get my data back.

I used Ubuntu's disk check program (cracking tool by the way!) and did some thorough checks on the disks. They could both read and write perfectly fine within the specifications listed for them. I installed Ubuntu to the first disk fine, and I can do so for the second disk also.

I guess all in all, I was very unlucky to have my RAID volume die on me but also very lucky it wasn't anything to do with the hardware. It comes down to crappy RAID software I guess.

Thanks for the help and advice people.
 
Oberon said:
Ok, I decided to lay off calling OCuk about the Motherboard/HDD's. Instead I opted to boot Ubuntu from a live CD. Couldn't get access to the contents of the array however and accepted I could not get my data back.

I used Ubuntu's disk check program (cracking tool by the way!) and did some thorough checks on the disks. They could both read and write perfectly fine within the specifications listed for them. I installed Ubuntu to the first disk fine, and I can do so for the second disk also.

I guess all in all, I was very unlucky to have my RAID volume die on me but also very lucky it wasn't anything to do with the hardware. It comes down to crappy RAID software I guess.

Thanks for the help and advice people.
Click to expand...

Have you run this test with the drives still connected to the SATA 6Gbps ports?

These aren't affected by the chipset problem, only the SATA 3Gbps ports may fail.
 
Yes, I tested them both on the 3Gbps ports and the 6Gbps ports. The ports seem to be working perfectly though I have switched both over to the 6Gbps ports for the time being. I have come to put the failure down to either/combination of a dodgy windows update, crap raid drivers and using the old BIOS. I have Ubuntu on one drive and a new Windows 7 64bit installation on the other. Both are in great nick after repeated check disk scans.
 
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