Is my RAID card going wonky? (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Sun]

I have a pretty new motherboard (Abit IC7-MAX) that should be able to handle the larger than 137GB hard drives that need 48-bit addressing.

I have 2 160GB ATA100 hard drives connected to a Highpoint RocketRaid100 card in RAID 0 configuration for 298GB (real GB) in disk space.

I'm running XP with SP1 (which should be able to handle the greater than 137GB HD capacities, as I also have a 200GB ATA100 drive that is also installed and working). Initially, I was able to partition and format it for 298GB of disk space, and it had been working fine up to this past weekend.

As I got to putting more and more files on the RAID 0 array, when I get to around 240GB, the RAID controller starts beeping, and it complains that one of the drives is not working. So I reboot, and the RAID 0 array is still intact, but if I add more files to it, I get the RAID controller beeping at me, and it complains that the other drive is not working.

After I back up my data, I delete the RAID 0 array, and start over from scratch.

I boot back up, have XP's disk manager create a large primary partition on the RAID 0 array, and then I format the partition with NTFS. The formatting gets to 86% and then it hangs (86% of 160GB is 137GB). That appears to me that I'm still hitting the 137GB wall in this RAID 0 array. What should I do to alleviate this situation.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Well, I have bios 2.31 on the Highpoint RR100 card, so that's fine.
Downloaded the latest Raid Management software from their website.

I did a quick scan, a full scan, and a Low Level Format on each of the WD 160GB hard drives last night (took around 4-5 hours). Each HD scanned clean, no errors. I also made sure to use the WD utilities to set the ATA speed at 100 for the HDs.

I downloaded the Network version of XP SP1A (125MB) and installed it and rebooted.

I used the Raid Management software to create the Raid 0 array (I had used the RR100 BIOS at the bootup stage to create the array before booting into XP on my previous attempt).

Then using XP's disk management, I initialized and partitioned the full array's space of 298GB (true GBs), and formatted it in NTFS, 64K cluster size.

So far, so good, but I have filled it up yet, so I'll find out later tonight if I run up against the same problem as I get close to the 240GB disk space level of files.

 

[tom stewart]

see this article on microsoft.com. do a search for Q303013
its a patch which enables hardrive support for larger drives.

 

[Tekara]

try getting a third party scan program that will scan the data sector of the hard drives. the win 9x series scandisk will do this, but NT will not.

I found this out when I was trying to find out what was wrong with a flash memory card. my home computer with winXP reported no problems, but my work computer with winME found the problem. . . after much playing around I found out that NT's scandisk doesn't bother scanning the data area on a thourough scan.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I'm hoping my updating to SP1A handled all the registry changes needed for the 48-bit addressing for HD larger than 137Gb.

Wouldn't the WD utility tell me if the disk was good or had bad sectors after doing a deep scan and a LLF?

 

[Tekara]

not neccesarily, with that flash card I mentioned earlier I could write data to it without an issue in the world; the problem only cropped up when I tried to access the file later.