I have had XP Pro SP3 installed and running perfectly on two identical 500 GB drives set in RAID 0 (striping) mode. But since the case only supports two drives and I was running out of space, I replaced the two 500 GB drives with two identical 1 TB drives.
I copied the old partitions (including the OS partition) using Acronis Disk Director Suite 10, which worked fine. The system booted and ran perfectly all day.
Now, on only the second day I’ve tried to use this system with the 2 TB capacity, the RAID management system that runs during the BIOS loading reports that one of the two disks has some unspecified “error”. No other information is provided.
Obviously, I can’t fix it inside Windows, since it won’t boot.
If the RAID card BIOS is reporting a problem, I doubt it will even be accessible to chkdsk. You should probably find the documentation for your RAID card, or contact the support department of the company that makes it, to find out if there is any way to get more detailed diagnostic information.
It is likely that one of the disks is defective. I would just return it and try another one (you do have backups, right?)
I did as you suggested (well, I used chkdsk /p /r), and chkdsk reported it had repaired the problem. However, when I rebooted, the RAID BIOS still reported that one of the drives still had an unspecified “error”.
However, Windows booted! What emergency steps would you recommend now?
UPDATE: Windows booted, but it didn’t run long. Now it’s just hung.
I’m going to keep running chkdsk until it reports that it didn’t fix any problems. If the RAID BIOS still reports an error after that, I’m going to try to run Western Digital’s Data Lifeguard diagnostics.
I have a backup of most of the data I need, so I can start from scratch again. As for returning the drive, I bought it and its partner new on eBay, so returning it may not be easy. I wonder if I can return it to Western Digital instead.
By the way, I’d prefer to do without RAID 0, but drives that run as fast as I want without striping are much more expensive.
I found a bad connection from the power supply or data cable can cause that error. I didn’t have a RAID card but did use the stripe configuration at one time. The hard drive could be bad too, but I think checking the two things I mentioned is worth trying. Connect a different power connector from the power supply onto the bad drive. Change the data cable.
Well, the Western Digital diags (cheap and unimpressive, in my opinion) did report “too many errors to list” on the drive in question, so it’s RMA time. I’m going to send it back to WD instead of the eBay seller.
All in all, this episode has made me more nervous, both about eBay and about RAID 0. I guess I’m going to have to do daily backups of the data on the RAID 0 volume, which means I’m going to have to invest in 2 TB of non-RAID online backup storage just so I can get decent disk speed (I do a lot of video capture and editing, so I need the speed).