Said raid lockup problem -- caused by low level format?

[WebDude]

I've got a raid1 setup off an adaptec raid card with 2 hitachi hd's. I had troubles installing xp after creating the raid1 array. XP install couldn't find any storage devices. I called Adaptec tech support. They first said to do a low level format of the hd's and then try again. The adaptec card has an option to do a low level format of the hd's. I did that, created the array again, and still had the same XP install problem. I called adaptec tech support back again, and this time they said there was a known issue with the early hitachi sata drives, and that I should use a diiferent driver for the XP install. That seemed to work. XP installed, but now i'm having problems. The machine gives a message about contacting your hardware supplier, then locks up solid.

I'm wondering if the low level formatting I did may have caused this. Don't hd's come with a 'fault table' or something that marks the bad sectors and puts them out of use? Would a low level formatting destroy this table, putting the bad sectors back in play? Wish I knew more about hard drives. I generally avoid low level formatting, but since the tech rep said to do it, I did. Now I think that may be the problem. Any thoughts?

 

[Fern]

Any thoughts?

Run a drive fitness proggie on the drives.

AFAIK, these LLF are just writing zero's to the HDD. "Real" LLF are only done at the factory.

You're not OC'd are you?

Fern

 

[rivan]

Sounds like a craptastic driver to me. Try a few versions of it, see if anything works.

OCing might really screw with that card, too, so if you're OC'd as Fern mentioned, go stock speeds and see where you're at.

The low level format done by adaptect cards tests the drive and updates the fault table for that drive. I don't think that's the right term, but I can't recall the right now one, and it's close enough. A LLF would update it, not overwrite it.

 

[WebDude]

Thanks for the replies. The system is not oc'd at all. I'm thinking the driver may be the problem.

One other piece of info I should have included. After I installed XP, I did all the windows XP updates through the MS update site (there were a lot of them). They all seemed to take. Then I tried to install MS Office 2003. The installation would start, then shut down with an error message. The message said something about msiexec.exe being unable to complete. I figured out that was the microsoft installer program. I was able to download and install an updated version of msiexec.exe, and then Office installed ok. But I'm wondering how the original msiexec.exe became corrupt. And if that file became corrupt, did others also? Could that be causing the lockups. Really hard to pin down at this point. I may end up just starting from scratch and reinstalling everything. A major pain, but not sure what else to do.