Western Digtal WinDLG Diagnostic Software and RAID

[BonzaiDuck]

I have a friend who's gone off the panic edge.

He has a RAID0 array with two SATA-II Raptor drives, and his system appears to be starting to fail.

So far, through the e-mails, I can't tell if it's a problem with his RAM, some corruption of OS files, or one of the Raptors.

Going over to his house tomorrow night with my MEMTEST86+ CD, and thought I'd download a diagnostic for WD drives.

Has anyone had any experience with WinDLG? Does it "see through" a motherboard RAID controller to harmlessly test drives in an array? Somehow, I'd question whether it can do that.

 

[Cerb]

IME, no, though it will vary by implementation. With Silicon Image's RAID, doing exactly what you're trying got two unbootable drives, as the RAID card saw neither drive as being part of the RAID set, and they were both mysteriously non-booting, after they were mounted and checked in Windows, running the other drive as a degraded array member, with the checked drive plugged in elsewhere (with both in the array, the drives were not individually testable).

My opinion is that you should just use the boot disk version, after setting the SATA mode to IDE. Once done, set it back to RAID before trying to boot back into Windows.

P.S. grrr, I meant to a "over 9000" pointless nef post in OT for my 9001st post, and I totally missed it

 

[BonzaiDuck]

IME, no, though it will vary by implementation. With Silicon Image's RAID, doing exactly what you're trying got two unbootable drives, as the RAID card saw neither drive as being part of the RAID set, and they were both mysteriously non-booting, after they were mounted and checked in Windows, running the other drive as a degraded array member, with the checked drive plugged in elsewhere (with both in the array, the drives were not individually testable).

My opinion is that you should just use the boot disk version, after setting the SATA mode to IDE. Once done, set it back to RAID before trying to boot back into Windows.

P.S. grrr, I meant to a "over 9000" pointless nef post in OT for my 9001st post, and I totally missed it

So . . . you're saying we should temporarily "unhinge" the array members and set them to "IDE" -- testing each one in turn? Interesting.

Anyone else have some insights on this? Anyway -- point being -- I don't think we could check the drives within Windows anyway. The system hangs at boot time -- somewhere during the Windows-splash and progress-bar. So we'd definitely have to make a bootable floppy or CD of the diagnostic.

 

[hennessy1]

No you can not test the drives in RAID. You must un-raid them and then test individually. This is what I always have to do with my drives to test them.

 

[razel]

With your friend's reaction, the very 1st thing I would do is tell him to make a copy of his beloved files. Then get him off his PC and be outside and get some sun. Why? The more he's fiddling around with degrading computer without more expert help, more likely more damage will be done.

 

[Cerb]

So . . . you're saying we should temporarily "unhinge" the array members and set them to "IDE" -- testing each one in turn? Interesting.

More specifically:
1. Burn a copy of the boot disk diags.
2. Shut the PC down.
3. if a card or special ports are used for RAID, change to non_RAID ones. If all ports are RAIDable, turn RAID off in the BIOS upon boot.
4. Test with the boot disk diags.
5. If it comes up clean, put the drives back in the array, or, if normal mobo RAID, turn RAID back on in the BIOS. This way, the RAID should still be fine, should the problem be elsewhere (PSU, mobo, RAM).
6. Boot Windows back up (which, I now see can't be done).

The key here is that you can't test individual drives with the RAID on. Now, I did miss pointing out that the situation I was dealing with was RAID 1, so each drive could be used out of the RAID, so sorry for the confusion, there. In RAID 0, you have no choice but to boot up some other OS. In that case, you technically could use another Windows PC, but it would be just as easy to boot up with the DOS-based diag CD.