More problems....! I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 board with two WD1200JD drives set up as a mirror raid and I'm using XP Pro with SP2.

All has been fine for some weeks since I got this new build system stable - except for a dot dash beep whilst booting up when it got to the nVIDIA raid setup option ("Press F10 to enter Raid setup utility") - but when booting up today there was a flashing red message at that point that the Raid was degraded.

Sure enough, in Windows Explorer both drives are now visible and there is approx 100MB difference between them in used space.

Tried to rebuild the Raid by pressing "R-Rebuild" in the nVIDIA Raid setup but nothing happened. Totally unsure what to do next - the Manual is no help.

I'm beginning to think life will be easier without the Raid being set up but whatever I do, I want to avoid ending up reinstalling XP and all the programs yet again.

Tony

Tony,

First off, if you get the warning, you want to check to make sure one of your drives is not failing.

The idea of a mirror is to keep your system up and running should a drive fail.

You need to figure out which Drive is correct, then make that Drive your new Master Drive.

You should run with the Drive you think it correct first to verify that there are no errors, then create a new array and set the good Drive as Primary. See if you can create the Mirrored Array and Sync the two Drives again.

Take Care,

Richard

Hi Richard - both these drives were new in September, however I think one of them may be making a slight chattering noise when I shut the system down. So presumably I can find out which just by disconnecting in turn and booting up, then shutting down.

Assuming there is a drive problem and I find out which is the fully serviceable drive, having made that the master, do I then just delete the current array and set up a new one? To sync the drives, do I have to erase the secondary drive's contents and then do the contents of the primary get automatically copied over when I've set up the new array? (I now have non-matching information on the drives).

I'm on the problem computer at the moment and don't seem to have any problems with this drive - only problem seems to be with MS Outlook which is giving weird errors when downloading mail.

Lots of questions - I'm lacking in knowledge here and the Manual doesn't help at all!

Edit - Richard, getting somewhere I think. I changed the boot priority in the Bios so that the secondary drive booted up and it came up with the message "Sorry for the inconvenience but Windows did not start properly last time etc" so I selected it to start Windows normally and it booted up okay but came up with "Found New Hardware" and this was "Generic Volume". Rebooted as required, ran a few programs - no problem.

Reselected the primary drive as first boot priority and rebooted, again no problems. So it looks as though it was a problem in XP on the secondary drive that flipped the Raid? I presume I'm now in a position to set up the raid again........but how do I do it?


Tony

Update yer BIOS to the latest version. Also scan both drives using Western Digital's drive diagnostic software to make sure they're ok. Download it here:

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#diagutils

You might have to take the drives off the RAID controller and put them on a normal IDE controller in order to scan them...

Thanks for the link, Chipzilla - Bios was already the latest version and the disks came up clean on those tests.

Next thing then I suppose would be to update your RAID drivers and nForce drivers. After that, the only thing that could be causing trouble is the power supply. Failing these options, it might be time to wipe both disks and start again...

PSU is a 550W Antec so no problems there. Surely the whole point of a mirror raid is to allow you to keep going in the event of a disk problem, and of course in this it has succeeded.

Suppose the secondary disk had failed terminally and I put in a new empty formatted drive in its place, there must be an option where the Raid can be rebuilt? In the nVIDIA Raid set up there is a rebuild option but it does nothing in the situation I'm in.

I really am thinking of doing away with the Raid, just using my Maxtor for backup, and using the second WD drive for video editing.....but it's annoying to be considering defeat!!

Speechless Two,

Go into where you setup the Array and have it sync the two drives. If you have the problem again, we will look in greater detail for the cause.

Take Care,

Richard