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Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 9:02 am Post subject: Old RAID on new hardware?

The background:

My wife asked me to work on a little video project as an anniversary present for her parents (10 monthes away). I wasn't going to have enough hard drive space to store all the video, so I was on the lookout for additional storage. I found a local guy selling two hard drives, and one of them is identical to a hard drive I already had. I also still have an old Promise Fasttrak 100 lying around. I bought the drives with plans of a nice RAID 0 array for video storage / work.

The problem:

The Promise card doesn't seem to want to play nicely with my nforce3 / A64 system. The setup is:

WD800JB as the boot drive, a WD1000BB as storage, and two WD1200JB's running on the Promise Card in a RAID 0 array. I didn't really need the 1000BB that badly, but the guy wanted to sell it and one 1200JB as a package.

Windows installed just fine. Everything works fine, as long as I don't try and access the array - and even that can work fine. While accessing the array, I get random pauses. Like mini freezes. The computer freezes for about 5 seconds randomly. By freezes, I mean mouse stops responding, nothing moving, frozen type freezes. Usually the process continues just fine after the freeze. A few times I have recieved an "inaccessable device" error. When this happens, the only way to access the array is to reboot. Once, I had a blue screen with an irq error related to fasttrak.sys.

The promise card has the latest bios flashed, and I am using the latest drivers. The system is:
MSI K8N-Neo Platinum Nforce3 250GB mobo
A642800+ processor
512MB (2x256MB) Corsair TwinX3200LL
Radeon 9600XT
Hercules Game Theater XP
Hauppage WinTV BT878 based capture card
Promise Fasttrak100

Anyone know whats causing this? Some one suggested it was a conflict between the NV Raid on the mobo and the Promise card, but I have all SATA ports and NV Raid disabled in the BIOS.

Too be honest, I don't really care if I use RAID, but since all of my hard drives / optical drives are IDE, I don't have enough ports on the mobo to use them all. I tried using the Fasttrak card with a single drive on it, not in an array, but it still exhibited the same problems.

[EDIT]Forgot to mention - Win2K SP4[/EDIT]

Leg Humper Joined: 16 Jan 2002 Posts: 5484

It could be a hardware conflict. Which PCI slot is the Promise card in?
It may be worth it to try it a different PCI slot. I usually use slot 1, but have had to use slot 2 on some servers, but it would fail before loading Windows (We also have Windows on the RAID drives and you do not).

Otherwise, if you have a spare computer try the RAID controller in it. It may be failing.

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 9:15 am Post subject:

Do you know for certain that the drive you bought works 100%

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 9:20 am Post subject:

Yeah, the drive is good. Both of the new drives passed WD's diagnostic software. The 1200JB even passed it while connected to the fasttrak.

I forgot to mention, the fasttrak controller works perfectly under DOS. I reinstalled windows as part of this setup. I made a couple of drive images using Powerquest's drive image, and the wrote to my original 1200JB connected to the fasttrak. It worked perfectly. I was even impressed by the speed (I usually end up making images from one partition to another on the same drive which = slow).

I had thought of the PCI slot as an issue. I am going to try and do a new install tonight with only the Fasttrak installed. We'll see what happens from there.