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It's wierd. Very wierd.

I have a RAID 0+1. (Data on system below.)

Whenever I turn the power off one of my drives gets "lost". Upon booting again the Promise RAID controller says the disk is "missing or corrupt". Mind you, this NEVER happens when I just restart.

The remedy is always the same: I tinker with it for a while and it is "found" again. Then I need to rebuild the array. I say tinker becouse thats what I do. I can not say what actually fixes the thing. I pull out cables, restart, switch power cables... nothing really big... just laying on hands.

I would really like it if you dogs could come up with ideas. I'm all out.

Board: ASUS P4C 800-E DeLuxe
RAID: 2 WD (striped) SATA mirrored with 2 Maxtor EIDE (striped) [One (always the same) Maxtor is the bad one]
RAID controller (on motherboard) Promise

TIA,
/Akely

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 4:02 am Post subject:

I got a raid
if the power goes off, the array has to re-synch
if it is shut down or restarted, it is fine.

try
1. the software/drivers in windows which monitors the array that it is shut off gracefully
if they are not present . .
not uptodate . .
not working prop
2. windows optional update for
shutdown of mapped drives and
shutdown of large drives

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 4:28 am Post subject:

Are your drives stagger-starting? Does the suspect drive spin up last? Does the suspect drive report any SMART errors?

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 4:47 am Post subject:

JustAnEngineer wrote:
Are your drives stagger-starting? Does the suspect drive spin up last? Does the suspect drive report any SMART errors?

If by stagger-starting you mean power/spin up one at the tyme I must answer I do not know. I THINK that they all start at the same tyme. From what small vibrations I do feel all drives spin up (even the "bad" one). I think I remember an Delayed Start on some SCSI hard drives. Not sure the Maxtors have them. I'll check.

No smart-errors are reported and Promise own management program says all is fine (until it finds nothing then it is all "duh??111!!".

Dave: all the drivers are up to date. But BIOS is not the latest one. But according to the info I have nothing has changed about the Promise RAID thing. Perhaps it is worth a shot.

Thanks guys!

/Akely

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 12:17 pm Post subject:

Have you tried re-seating the data and power cables?

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 12:26 pm Post subject:

hmm... power off and not restart

i'd check the battery on the mobo

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 4:57 pm Post subject:

Olive wrote:
hmm... power off and not restart

i'd check the battery on the mobo

That reminds me, the RAID card I have in my server has a battery also. If you have a battery on your card, check that also (but back up your configuration first) - refer to the manual.

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 5:49 pm Post subject:

AstronomyOnline wrote:
Olive wrote:
hmm... power off and not restart

i'd check the battery on the mobo

That reminds me, the RAID card I have in my server has a battery also. If you have a battery on your card, check that also (but back up your configuration first) - refer to the manual.

akely wrote:
RAID controller (on motherboard) Promise

i assumed they were one in the same in this case

Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 10:24 pm Post subject:

If the battery was dead, would that not affect everything in BIOS when the machine is powered od and taken off the electric grid? Or is it some EPROM like memory?

I've reseated the cables every tyme this happens. And since the only tyme the disk is 'lost' is when power is killed I figured it was not the cabling.

Things I will try (in this order):
1 - Updating BIOS to latest version.
2 - Check for stagger starting.
3 - Removing and exchanging the IDE cable.
4 - Exchanging the MB battery.

Anything else I should put up there?

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 8:25 am Post subject:

A few months ago I started having similar problems with my onboard Promise fastrack100 raid controller. I was not able to pin it down, but the drives themselves seemed fine; Promise would simply report that it was not able to find one of the drives in the array.

I backed up the array and rebuilt it a few times and it would work for a little while, but not for long. I was never able to find a fix, but the symptoms and hardware seem similar to what you are experiencing.

I eventually got sick of messing w/it and purchased a new Adaptec controller card. This worked for about 1 month, after which one of the drives failed for good. A month or two after I replaced it, the 2nd drive also failed.

Currently running the Adaptec controller and 2 new drives without issue.

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 9:26 am Post subject:

crewsr wrote:
A few months ago I started having similar problems with my onboard Promise fastrack100 raid controller. I was not able to pin it down, but the drives themselves seemed fine; Promise would simply report that it was not able to find one of the drives in the array.

I backed up the array and rebuilt it a few times and it would work for a little while, but not for long. I was never able to find a fix, but the symptoms and hardware seem similar to what you are experiencing.

I eventually got sick of messing w/it and purchased a new Adaptec controller card. This worked for about 1 month, after which one of the drives failed for good. A month or two after I replaced it, the 2nd drive also failed.

Currently running the Adaptec controller and 2 new drives without issue.

Damn! I hope I will not suffer this much! Sorry for your loss, but glad you shared.

/Akely

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 11:01 am Post subject:

that reminds me of my bro's computer
it was playing up with trwo drives ....
so he bought two new drives and put them on the primary after ghosting

and the old ones were on the secondary and there for getting old data in case

he's savvy, but not too savvy
didn't even notice when they stopped showing in explorer
then when they stopped showing in post
then when they stopped even turning on

drives do fail and they do have SMART data to help identify that they are going
and that little bios entry about SMART is a waste of time if you don't actually look at the data

run
HDD Health
on the drives with them NOT on the promise or adaptec
look at the SMART stats and see if the drives are ok

Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:00 am Post subject:

Dave Rave wrote:
run
HDD Health
on the drives with them NOT on the promise or adaptec
look at the SMART stats and see if the drives are ok

"HDD Health can not access the drive". That is probably so becouse Windows sees the 4 drives as one 240 Gig one (4x120 gigs RAID 0+1).

So HDD can't give any info here. The Promise Array Manager says all is fine (as I reported earlier).

/Akely

Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:08 am Post subject:

Oh boy, that was not fun!

Last night I tried to update the BIOS. Yep: TRIED TO.

I downloaded the latest ones and updated. THe machine would not even go to post and the Asus voice thing (Scary Lady) said "System fail due to overclocking." The only thing to do is power off and on. This resets the BIOS. I do so and make sure EVERYTHING is within safe parameters. No go.

Then I notice that the RAID array do not show up in BIOS as a bootable disk. In fact: it dou not show up at all. The post before entering BIOS do not even show any RAID info. "Uh-oh, this is bad."

Eventually, after trying another BIOS version I shrug and go back to the one I was using... And after setting up BIOS it works. And the small power off I made to reset BIOS have not made me lost the disk. Go figure. I wasted 3 hours on nothing.

I will, when I have more tyme, shut it of for a longer period and see what happens. Probably this weekend. I'll check for stagger start and fit new cables during that off-period.

/Akely

Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:08 am Post subject:

Dave Rave wrote:
run
HDD Health
on the drives with them NOT on the promise or adaptec
look at the SMART stats and see if the drives are ok

uhm ..... hint