Need help determining which drive is bad in a failed mirrored RAID array

[coomarlin]

I've been bitten by the IBM 75GXP bug for the third time now. This is the first time one of the drives have failed in a mirrored array.

My question is "How do I know which drive is bad?" What is the best way to determine that? I've got 2 75GB IBM 75GXP drives on a Promise RAID-0 array. When I boot my PC now I get RAID status "CRITICAL" instead of the customary "functional". The machine will still get into windows fine, but I'm gonna have to replace the bad drive ASAP. The error message tells me to hit control-A and get into the RAID configuration menu to determine which drive is bad, but when I do that I can not find any information telling me which of the 2 drives has failed.

Can I just unplug one of the drives and see if the computer boots up? Should I leave the drive on the raid channel, or will it boot properly if it's connected to a standard IDE port? I'm not sure what to do.

Any help would be greeatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Slikkster]

Are you using the Promise "Fastcheck" utility? That's supposed to identify the bad drive.

 

[coomarlin]

Fastcheck?

I'm not real sure what that is. I used Ctl-A to assess the RAID bios Setup and looked around in there, but I'm not aware of a Fastcheck utility. Is it software?

 

[Slikkster]

I'm not sure which Promise card you are using, but they have this utility called "Fastcheck" that runs in Windows itself, and gives you more info about your array and particular drives with their status. For example, here's the utility for the Fasttrack 66 series cards:

Fastcheck utility for Fasttrack 66 series Promise cards

If you don't have a Fasttrack66, go to the Promise site, click on "Support", then "Downloads", and choose your series card. Look for something like "xxxx Family Windows Utility , where "xxxx refers to whatever family or series of card you have" in the downloads. Install it in Windows, and boot up and run the thing and get a better idea of what is wrong.