Could someone tell me what this error log message means?

[GrumpyMan]

"A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\Ide Chn Dr1"

I was scanning my error log in Win XP and was wondering what this error means, just what is a parity error?

 

[Nothinman]

A parity error means data possibly got corrupted somewhere. Anything from memory to drive cables can cause problems like that.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Are you running hard drives in RAID 5 setup? It's obviously something to do with a hard drive. I can't recall if IDE uses plain old parity for data integrity or CRC.

 

[GrumpyMan]

No I'm not using Raid, just regular IDE. However I am trying some new Antec Cobra rounded 26" cables for the first time. I'm not o/cing yet. Could the cables be causing such an error? I know that the official IDE standard is 18" so I'm wondering if that could be a problem. I guess I'll also have to give Memtest a shot to rule out my Rdram pc 1066. This is all on P4T533-C with a 3.06 on it. From what I have read so far is that this can happen on Raid or SCSI setups but I have no clue yet on why this is happening all of a sudden. I also upgraded my bios, could this also be the cause?

 

[tigerwannabe]

based on the error, i'd say it was the hd cable. you might try your old cable & see if you still get the error. does the error happen often or just a 1 time thing?

 

[GrumpyMan]

It happens from time to time, not every day. And it seems to happen to IDE 1 and IDE 2 which are my main back up and storage drives. My main drive IDE 0 is a Maxtor Ultra Plus 9 that does not seem to be affected yet, only my WD JB's. I'll change my cables and do further testing. They are in this configuration:
IDE Channel 1
Maxtor-master to
WD-slave
IDE Channel 2
DVD-CD-RW combo-master
WD-slave
Of course I keep everything backed up just in case there is full corruption. Sometimes I'll also get a parity error involving the page file for some reason too, which does happen to be on my Maxtor ( C: ). Could all be related I suppose.