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Using Raid as your primary drive under XP

M

MrScoot

Junior Member
Using Raid as your primary drive under XP - NIGHTMARES

I am a tech, not a home user. While I may not be the brightest bulb on the planet I'm certaintly not without an occasional flash or two.

Here is the problem...

Installing XP to a raid array is NOT the issue. (F6, latest drivers, etc etc) The issue rears its head later in the game in the form of an unbootable machine. BAD HIVE. Win2K recovers from the problem a little more gracefully by initiating a scandisk every so many reboots. XP just bombs. But why.

I'm thinking the problem has to be tied to the raid and or raid caching... but I am open to ideas.

With the wide proliferation of IDE Raid systems out there today I have to believe that I am not the only one experiencing the problem - WHAT IS THE FIX?

Between myself and two others that have been playing the the newer IDE raid solutions available, we have worked with and experienced the same results with 3 different boards from Gigabyte, MSI and ABIT. Both the Promise and HP controllers experience the same difficulty. Three brands of identically matched drives - various memory and other hardware configs... etc etc.

Any help would be appreciated.


NOTE: This post is NOT an effort to invoke the debate over the use or disuse of RAID, performance misinformation, etc etc. - I am simply seeking help from someone that has seen or experienced the same problem and found a solution. 😉

Thanks in advance.
 
There where known issues with 2K on faster hardware where the os would turn the computer off before the drive's had a chance to flush their caches to the disk. The results where data corruption, often the registry corruption you mentioned. Is it possible that your raid controller (or even drive, does it have a huge cache?) is having a timing issue and this is still happening?

I'm running a promise raid stripe set on XP, for what it's worth I've never seen the problem. But these drives don't have huge caches on them either.

You might want to search on XP/2k drive cache and shutdown, maybe their are some available timing tweaks to help?

Bill
 
This thread talks about making sure you have 80pin cables on the drives (you probably do, but just in case...)
 
I just posted a message for this a minute ago....im having sort of the same problem, and im very sure Im using 80 wire IDE cables.
I keep getting a corrupt HIVE in XP. This is usually after I sync the drives as a mirror and reboot a time or two.
 
I have had so many configurations now I can safely say that there is more going on than the cables or the Via 4in1's However...

I will keep looking for a solution to the unwritten data in the cache files at shutdown.\

Anyone else have these issues?
 
IDE-Raid may not work, but have you tried any SCSI hardware raid? If you have the cash, that is truly the way to go (a good ServeRaid 4lx controller will set you back $400, but comes with a p100 and 32M cache).
 
Since you said that you are using the F6 bios is it safe to assume that you are using a Gigabyte GA-7DXR?

So what mainboard are you using and what video card?
 
> Since you said that you are using the F6 bios is it safe to assume that you are using a Gigabyte GA-7DXR?

What he said is that he did install the correct drivers by pressing F6 during XP's setup.
Bill
 
Same issue once again with another system today....this time its a PCI Adaptec RAID. It corrupts the data even before I get Windows installed.
 
Not the VIA 4 in 1's or cables. This was tried on 3 systems here....an Gateway Intel based, a Dell Intel based, and a custom AMD with VIA. All tried using RAID 1.
This is using Windows 2000, and XP. Tried both installing on the onboard IDE first and then the RAID.
 
The longest I had a system up and running before outright failure was about a week.

What boggles me is that I am obviously not alone here but yet I cant find a single shred of information in the MS KB or at any of the Motherboard sites.

Although I have been tempted to simply give up and go SCSI, that doesnt solve the issue for everyone out there that wants the increased performance of the IDE raid for sustained transfers reflected in thier OS. I sure as H&%# dont need an IDE raid array to store my MP3s. 🙂

I keep coming back to the problem stemming from unwritten files cached at time of shutdown because none of the failures happen during normal operation of the machine. The monster rears it's HIVEish head during a reboot. If you never had to reboot, it wouldn't be an issue.

Has anyone seen anything like the fix issued for WIN98 for flushing the cache during shutdown for XP?


 
NOTE: POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO RAID PROBLEMS!!

You need to try putting both Hard Drives on the SECOND IDE Channel on the RAID controller and set one as MASTER and the other as SLAVE. This is indeed an issue with High Point controllers that has not been officially addressed yet. (Specifically the 370/372 model)
There is a problem with 2000 and XP they are working on new Chip Revisions for....and BIOS updates. Hopefully they won't need to recall all motherboards and controller boards with this model of chips.
 
Its a HIGH Point controller problem....fixing it using Microsofts solution only temporarily fixes the problem. (look above for solution from Adaptec's tech support.)
 
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