Hey All, It's been a little while since I've posted, just got married and moved n such. But ofcourse now that things in life are settled down, the computer starts to flare up. I'll give a step-by-step of the downward spiral of my system this evening. 0) My System: EVGA 680i SLI mobo, Q6600, RAID 0 - (2) WD Raptors 150GB [Boot, Windows, System], RAID 5 - (4) Seagate Barracuda 300GB [storage], Windows XP - Been running solid with no hitches for about 8 months now. 1) Tried to play some starcraft - went to connect to b.net & starcraft crashes with a typical "Send Error" msg. 2) Restarted computer. 3) During restart, I noticed in my MediaShield check that my RAID 5 array had an issue: It was blinky red, and showed one disk as "ERROR" and the next line "DEGRADED". RAID 0 array was Healthy tho. Windows started fine. I've not had to rebuild a RAID array yet, so I looked about on how to do this. Downloaded latest nForce / MediaShield software from nVidia's website. 4) Tried to install nVidia software. It said something about an ethernet driver, and that it first had to uninstall the ethernet driver, then restart, so I said OK. It did its thing, said to restart, so I did. 5) System began to restart, RAID 5 still showed as "degraded". The Windows loading screen went fine, the scroll was going on the bottom. G15 LCD started up, everything began responding, then: blank screen. It basically loaded, but then froze blank on the login screen. 6) I manually restarted. This time the Mediashield shows the RAID 5 array as white text and "Rebuild". I pressed F8, booted in Safe Mode. It gets to the login screen fine, but the screen in frozen at the login. I can see the users and their pictures screen, but it's frozen. 7) Reboot a NUMBER of times, same things happen. Sometimes windows would take forever to load, sometimes it would be instant. I tried to "Load Last Known Good Configuration" - Same freeze to blank screen. Note also that sometimes, the system wouldn't get past the MediaShield check "Detecting Arrays... _"; kept blinking, but wouldn't go further. Restart would fix this, and it the next time it would load thru this fine. 8) I put in Windows CD, get to "recovery" menu, and select it. It takes me to a DOS type command prompt. I tried looking around in some directories, but to no avail, so I typed EXIT to restart. Computer freezes, I have to reboot. 9) After a few attempts and reboots, I got back onto the Windows CD, did a repair installation of Windows. After it completed copying files successfully, I restarted as prompted. 10) Windows Loading screen starts up, freezes almost instantly mid-scroll. 11) Manual restart. Windows goes through loading screen, finished scrolling: Blank Screen Freeze. 12) Manual restart. Windows loads up successfully, takes me to Install screen - Windows Repair install progresses well. After entering my name and XP key, an nVidia window popped up to “continue install.” I’m assuming it was the intended reinstall of the nVidia drivers that I originally tried, but it said in the window, “We detect a windows installation service running already. Press OK to minimize this process until windows installation is complete, or press Cancel to abort.” I clicked Cancel, hoping this would perhaps remove a start-up service that was hanging up windows. I then continued Windows installation. It was fine until "Registering Components" portion. It then remained at "13 minutes" for over 7 hours. The new features messages keep alternating, and the little progress bubbles bottom right keep moving. After 7 hours, however, I just turned off the machine. Why did all of these crazy things all happen at once? What is going on that's freezing at the login screen, in safe mode even? Any suggestions for fix? Another question: For rebuilding the array, for a typical situation, I just set up the MediaShield menu to "Rebuild" the error'd drive, and that's it right? It's automatic after that right? I've exhausted the extent of my knowledge, and am at a loss. Any help, please? Thanks, surfsk8snow.jah
I feel really sorry fo You... I guess you will consider total image + incremental backups next time you configure your setup... An OS will always crash, the question is when and why? The more complex a system is, the sooner it will crash... With an image-backup, up your sleve, it is more likely that you will find the cause of the crash... and save you lots of time, especially if the crash was due to human error...
While I am not overly experienced with RAID, I would say that if you have a failed drive, telling it to rebuild will not work. I would think you would need to hit the appropriate key on boot up to get into the RAID configuration screen and find out what drive has failed. Then you would replace the failed drive. Then you would have it rebuild the RAID array. Then if your system is mirrored you could restore from the mirrored drive. Depends on which level of raid you are using, the number of drives etc. I don't recall what each RAID level does with out reading up on it as I do not currently use it.
Nvidia First off, if yours is a HDD monitoring enabled BIOS, I would expect your initialization to report a HDD failure. Enter the BIOS and see if HDD errors have been reported. What caught my eye was a possible NVIDIA problem. It may be a RAID Controller/ARRAY problem (mine is VIA V-RAID, never had a problem) but I wonder. I use NVIDIA GeForce and if apply the latest driver, my XP SP3 OS goes berserk. It took me a while to figure out it was the driver but I never figured out what it was about my setup that caused problems and why the driver's effects were universally felt. Uninstalling the driver (via cmd line) curred my ills (I also could not boot in Safe Mode) So, in your post number 4 when you say you tried to install NVIDIA, bells went off in my head. Monk
The bad hard drive could very well be the reason the computer has been freezing. You should replace the bad drive and let the RAID bios utility rebuild it. Then see if the Windows repair completes. Another thing is don't install the Firewall component of the Nvidia network driver. Third party firewall software including Nvidia's cause people lots of problems.
One of your RAID 0 harddrives has failed. Since data is striped in a RAID 0 array, you have incomplete or corrupted system or application files that resided in the bad sectors on the failed drive. Such corrupted files can cause any number of problems trying to boot or run windows. The biggest problem with RAID0 is no redundancy, striped data is split between the drives. You hopefully have image backups, otherwise you will need to run diagnostics on both drives, and replace the failed drive, then rebuild your system from scratch or a backup image. RAID 0 is a poor choice where data integrity is required. I suggest any RAID 0 array needs a regular backup routine of drive imaging for bare bones recovery should one of the drives fail. May I suggest either a RAID 0+1 (aka RAID 10) array or a drive imaging backup routine for RAID 0 if you want some kind of data integrity.
In this case his RAID 0 is still working, but one of the drives in his RAID 5 is bad. Yes, with RAID 0 (stripe) you double the chance of a hard drive problem disabling your system, and you lose 2 drives worth of data instead of 1. I would configure the Raptors as RAID 1 (mirror) myself. I don't think the speed increase of RAID 0 is worth the increased risk. On the other hand if you have a good backup system in place then you will only lose what has changed since your last backup. And if you keep anything important on drives other than the RAID 0 then a failure will only be inconvenient, not devastating. Anything important should always be in 2 places no matter what your setup. Most people, including myself, don't backup nearly as often as they should.
True. But if you -use an HDD with one "primary partition" for the OS (usually C:\) -have this HDD partitioned with several "logical partitions" for example D:\ E:\ etc... -move \My Documents\ from your \Documents and Settings\ to D:\ or E:\ -do an image backup before and after every change of C:\ -have an incremental image backup for the whole system... you should be fine always... ...
Oh, DOH!, I obviously skimmed the article only and missed some key details. Sorry for oversight there. My bad. RAID 5 is the way to go these days (or RAID6 for redundancy), I've seen issues with some drives on some controllers that can appear to be a repeatedly broken array, not sure if that's what you are experiencing. Google your controller and drive models. It still sounds like you have a failed drive that needs replacing before rebuilding/reinstalling. Either way you should run the Mfg. Diags. on the questionable drive at the very least. If I have an array that keeps rebuilding, I'm guessing one or more drives are likley failing.