Is Vista to Blame?

[Bill Anderson]

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.

 

[Richard Urban]

I really don't see how a new raid driver, installed in Vista, would have any
affect on Win2K or Windows XP - unless you have all the operating systems
installed to the same partition.

If each O/S is in it's own partition, as it should be, there should be no
consequence of doing so.

After the raid driver has been installed, Vista will likely see the drive as
being new hardware. I have run across this. Just allow the chkdsk to
continue to termination and everything should be OK. If you have 1 large 500
gig partition, and a lot of files on that partition, it could take many
hours to do so. That is one reason for partitioning a drive into smaller
partitions. You just run chkdsk on the one that is having the problem.

If you flashed the bios of the raid card, every O/S installed on your
computer would be affected.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban MVP
Microsoft Windows Shell/User

 

[Shane Nokes]

What CHKDSK was finding was bad physical sectors on the HD's.

That's a hardware fault, not an OS fault.

I'd contact the drive manufacturers for replacements.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Combining RAID 0 with a dynamic disk is a disaster waiting to happen. When
one of the drives fails you will lose the data with very little hope of
recovery unless you have a current backup. The fact that in all OS' the
volume is showing errors is very disturbing and indicative of a bad drive.
Are there any errors in any of the event logs in any of the OS' that are
errors reading or writing to this volume?

 

[andy]

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

 

[Bill Anderson]

Combining RAID 0 with a dynamic disk is a disaster waiting to happen.
When one of the drives fails you will lose the data with very little
hope of recovery unless you have a current backup. The fact that in all
OS' the volume is showing errors is very disturbing and indicative of a
bad drive. Are there any errors in any of the event logs in any of the
OS' that are errors reading or writing to this volume?

Yes, there were error reports all over the place in the event logs, all
dealing with bad sectors on K:, the dynamic drive -- the RAID array.

I ran Checkdisk on the drive from within Windows and it did find errors.
I've copied everything off the drive again and reformatted it -- this
time a full format. I'm running Checkdisk on it again, as I'm typing
this. Disk Manager still reports that the drive has errors and is at
risk, though healthy, whatever that means.

My current RAID array is the only RAID array I've ever dealt with. As
it seemed to be working fine, I have never been too concerned about Disk
Manager reporting errors. I figured that was standard for a RAID array.
So here goes with a dumb question: If you have a RAID array, would
you please look at it in Disk Manager and tell me whether it shows up
clean with no errors, with no "at risk" flag? Have I been ignoring
something really important for the past six months? The drive does tell
me it's "healthy," after all.

Checkdisk continues to run. This time I'm running it in Vista. We'll
see what happens in the morning. And thanks for alerting me to the
event log. I hadn't thought to look there.

 

[Richard Urban]

If chkdsk is telling you that you have defective sectors, that is a physical
disk problem and is cured by replacing the bad drive. They can not be
repaired.

Logical disk errors can be repaired by running chkdsk ?: /f, where the ? is
replaced by the drive you wish to test. Run this command from an elevated
command prompt window (run as administrator).

--


Regards,

Richard Urban MVP
Microsoft Windows Shell/User

 

[Paul Smith]

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

Why not? I've found Windows Update now to be nothing less than stellar at
finding and installing drivers.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*

 

[Kerry Brown]

One or both of the drives is going bad. If Windows is reporting bad sectors
the drive is in imminent danger of failing altogether. Test them
independently from each other with the drive manufacturer's drive diagnostic
program to determine which one then replace it. Windows won't be able to
tell you which one it is as Windows only sees one big drive.

Personally I never use RAID 0 and only use dynamic drives in very special
circumstances on servers. Both are hard to recover data from if a drive goes
bad. RAID 0 has no redundancy and greatly increases the chance of data loss
due to drive failure. The very small speed increase from RAID 0 doesn't
justify the increased risk in my mind. Very few data recovery utilities work
with dynamic drives. Both can also cause problems with some disk imaging,
backup, defrag, etc. programs.

 

[Shane Nokes]

Because, to be honest, they are usually out of date.

It's better to go to the manufacturers website and download the drivers.

Also because Windows Update (even in Vista) doesn't remove older versions of
drivers even when you've installed a newer set.

Case in point, I have Catalyst 7.2 drivers from ATi, yet Windows Update kept
listing the Cataylst 7.1 drivers even though I had installed 7.2 even before
the 7.1's started showing up on Windows Update.

So it could confuse a user and cause them to install and older driver on top
of a newer driver, and that's never a good idea.

 

[John]

Yes some raid drivers are not compatible between OS's
You can check it out, goto promise and look at drivers for xp

Also are u a company, or home user. Raid sounds nice huh, good for
corp, and box really ever changes....

Also if prob I've seen people who never even test to see if there was
a prob drive want bad if bkup would work or how u would do this, kind
of funny...

If your a home user, sound like "TV" Vista comes with a bkup (Image)
u can make and restore your system by inserting your vista disk and
booting into and restoring with your image

I myself use Hard disk manger by paragon, makes incrementals at
scheduled times

Also U don't have to bother with dynamic disk, not backward
compatible, well it is in paragon U can covert it back to basic ntfs
disk

John