One of my RAID0 drives is going kaboom...

[RahulM]

Hey guys. I have two drives on a Raid-0 config. Earlier, my system locked up, and I hit the reset button. During bootup, it got stuck on "Detecting Array", and gave me a red-colored failure message. I had to shutdown and wait a while for it to work. I quickly backed up all important data as soon as I had access to windows.

I was meaning to format and reinstall XP soon, but now I don't know if I should. I don't want to install on the failing disk by accident. Is there a way to figure out which of the two is about to die?

 

[jpeyton]

Use a disk check utility; Symantec, Acronis, and other companies make them. You might even find one from your hard drive manufacturer on their website.

Google "Hiren's BootCD" for an all-in-one solution.

It might not be the drive dying; it could just be that your RAID controller screwed up the array.

 

[RahulM]

I tried my utilities with a SMART scan. But none of them seemed to work on RAID0 configured drives. I'll try out some more.

 

[Kakumba]

1: Can you get into your controllers BIOS?
2: Does your controllers BIOD tell you which drives are attached, and maybe give some info on them?
3: Failing that, does your controller have a utility in Windows to tell you?

failing all of that, what is your controller?

 

[Rubycon]

The best bet is to take each drive and connect it to a native IDE/SATA port on the motherboard and run a diagnostic on it either from the manufacturer or a utility such as SpinRite 6.0.

 

[nineball9]

I had the same problem with my RAID-0 array a number of years ago; one of the drives failed and I did not know which one. I keep regular backups of the array using True Image. I just broke the array leaving me with 2 independent drives. Seagate's drive utilities could not identify either drive as faulty so I tried installing Windows on one of the drives. I had Windows do a full format at the beginning of the install and sure enough, one of the drives formatted with bad sectors. I returned that drive.

While waiting for the replacement drive, I installed my most recent True Image image on the lone good drive and the system worked fine. When the replacement drive arrived, I imaged my lone-drive system, shutdown and installed the new drive, built a RAID-0 array and loaded the image I had just created. Worked great. Not only was I able to identify the failing drive, but I also tested my backup "solution" which I had procrastinated doing!

 

[SerpentRoyal]

KISS. I don't RAID. Keep only the OS in the C primary active partition. It takes 42 seconds to image this 945MB partition. You can always reload any application in minutes. If you have a good image file of the CORE OS, then you're good to go.

 

[KingGheedora]

What's the best imaging software. Do you typically need a working system to run the imaging software from, or can you boot from CD to re-image?