SATAII RAID 5 Corrupted Hard Drives???

[vipergrm]

Hi guys,

I am having some issues with my RAID 5 setup. One of the hard drives in my array of x3 Hitchachi Deskstar 250GB SATAII HDDs' failed and I had to replace it. The RAID was running fine on two drives but then, suddenly this happened: I get to the XP logon screen and after about 10 seconds, the egg timer appears and the computer restarts. I have tried booting into safe mode which works, but sometimes I will get the 'BSOD' and again, the computer restarts. Sometimes, it will logon to XP as normal but this is about 1 in 20 attempts. I got the replacement HDD and rebuilt it on the array again, but I was still getting the same problems. I decided to re-install Windows XP.

So far, I have not been able to get it to work. During install, the screen will hang on 'PAGE FAULT'. When installing components. Immediately, I thought there must be a problem with one of the other hard drives. So I ran the IBM/Hitachi fitness test 10 times on each drive. Each of the 3 drives reported no errors.

Is it possible my array is corrupt? I am totally clueless as to what is wrong with this. Should I try using another diagnostic tool?

Your help is very much appreciated, thank you!

 

[vipergrm]

Sounds like there's something up with the array. When you re-installed it did you recreate the array from scratch or just use the rebuilt array?

No, I didn't delete the array because I have a few important partitions on it. I guess I will have to back this up somehow and recreate the array, just like you say. Before I tried re-installing Windows, I tried the basic HDD benchmark program (I forget the name of it) and the results were awful. MY avergage MB/s read was around 14MB/s and it got way bad towards the end of the test (down below 2MB/s). Something is not right here at all.

I also noticed that, on the few ocasions I did get the PC to boot, it kept asking me for RAID controller drives each time. This definately isn't normal. I am putting this down to the array being messed up, or perhaps there is a problem with the RAID driver/motherboard (It is an Asus P5NE-SLI).

Thanks

 

[vipergrm]

There's certainly something not right there. I'd backup and start again to be honest.

Normally I'm not a fan of onboard RAID5 anyway, the write performance tends to leave a lot to be desired.

I agree. What I might do is just mirror them. I could just run one drive without being backed up. I could certainly live with this. Will the performance be worse?

Thanks

 

[vipergrm]

The write performance will be better with mirroring but you'll be reading from only one drive so you'll see a fair drop in read speed.

How much of your data are you looking to have backed up? Is 2 disks in RAID0 plus the third as a backup an option?

I don't understand how this would work. They are all 250GB drives.