Raid 1, Win XP issues

[PathMaster]

I have not had a lot of time with Raid configurations, so I need some help.

Have a client with a Dell XPS 410, 320 Gig Raid 1 Array. It was giving him issues, not booting fully. BSOD 8086 on chkdsk. I was able to skip the chkdsk on startup and get into his wife's profile, no issues. I wanted to check the hard drive status, so I did a HDD test via the BIOS. Both tests passed. I did further tests within the System Diagnostics and they passed those tests as well. I this point I assumed software related. Not hardware related.

Popped in the Recovery disk, ran a chkdsk /r. Took a long while and found errors. Rebooted, now it shows the Array as being degraded. I go to boot XP, shows the XP boot screen, bar moves, stops like it should and nada. Black screen. Safe Mode, stalls on the Mup.sys.

Any ideas? It may have done the black screen before the chkdsk. I was playing with Bios settings, but I have defaulted them back twice, and confirmed settings, and see nothing.

Thanks, if anyone can help!

[Vandabo]

I've had a number of RAID controllers fail in our corporation... I don't have a ton of experience with it, but in three cases just booting from one of drives (bypassing the raid controller and plugging directly into the motherboard) worked fine. In one of those cases we replaced the controller and it worked, in the other two we just ditched the RAID and continued with one drive as the system drive and the other as a data drive (they weren't important computers).

I don't know much about the technical side of the RAID stuff, but this is how we fixed a couple.

[KidCactus]

A degraded RAID usually means one of the drives in the array has failed.

[PathMaster]

Both test fine still. One just says it has errors. If I turn off drive 1, which has errors and try to boot, the system will still not boot. I guess I can try another chkdsk on the drive by itself.

[RandoM51]

A degraded RAID usually means one of the drives in the array has failed.
Or somebody ran a chkdsk on one of the mirrors instead of the volume. Good gear usually won't let you do something like that without lots of confirmation, though. Even then it should just resync the volume as long as one of the mirrors is clean. If one was bad and then you chkdsk'd the other they'd both be flagged as out of sync but you could just force the one you chkdsk'd as active/clean and it would remirror the other.

I'm talking about software RAID, like Veritas Volume Manager. True hardware RAID won't let you make these sorts of errors in the first place. I'm not saying anybody did this, just that it is a possible way something like this could happen, BTW.

[PathMaster]

I believe it is hardware Raid, I think. I was able to get into Recovery and run the chkdsk. Afterward I learned that may have not been the best course of action.

I was able to boot into MiniXP, opened up the Intel Matrix program, changed the status of drive 1 to okay, AFTER I redid HDD diagnostics on it again. After I changed the status, I have been able to re-mirror the drives. It is in the process now, rebuilding the array. I have a feeling this will take a number of hours.

Hopefully this fixes the boot issues.

[RandoM51]

The boot issue should already be fixed if you marked one of the mirrors clean. That is enough to start the volume and the mirror will occur in the background. Yes, it will take awhile, particularly if you're using that volume at the same time.

[PathMaster]

Drive 0 was fine, Drive 1 had an error. But it would boot up, just load a black screen, almost like it wanted to boot, but nada. I almost thought it would do mirroring at the point, but I would imagine that it would show something on screen to that affect.