SATA Problems

Computer Forum Storage Devices
1

Hi, hope someone here can help, please!

I had two 120Gb SATA hdd set up in a mirrored array. The RAID is done in hardware on the motherboard (Abit KV8 Pro).

The other night, during a disk-heavy operation (un-raring a large archive) the PC slowed, and then locked up hard. When I hit the reset button the RAID BIOS kicked in and said there was a disk fault on the drive on channel 0, giving me the option to refresh the mirror or continue to boot.

First time round I continued to boot, which sort of worked but was really really slow. I never waited long enough for the OS to come up, I could see it would take hours.

Second time round, I rebooted, it showed the same RAID BIOS message and I selected to refresh the mirror. It started the refresh, displayed a progress bar and then just sat there, for an hour, with no progress.

I have tried both drives, singly (having broken the mirror) and together, in both the SATA channels, and I get variously:

  1. The slow boot
  2. A much faster looking boot, that unfortunately stops just as the Windows XP splash with the progress bar. When it does this, there’s an audible click (could be power, could be hdd) and then reboots again.

Thinking (hoping) it was the onboard SATA I went out and bought a PCI SATA card, and get exactly the same results.

I find it really hard to believe that both hard-drives have died at the same time, but I’m otherwise at a loss to explain why the results of using a different SATA interface.

Any ideas?

Tomorrow I will borrow an IDE drive from work, reinstall Windows on that, or maybe use a linux boot CD and see if I can access the SATA drives from an OS on a different disk.

2

I assume you are using RAID Level 1? I think its unlikey that both HD have died, would be bad luck if they have. The audible click sound (if coming from the HD) doesnt sound good.

Borrowing the HD from work would be a excellent idea, I hope you recover you files.

And I was just thinking today about the best way to store my files, was gona setup Raid 1 only, but now will also back on another HD and DVD.

3

Some good news. With the IDE drive containing a clean install of XP one of the disks functions perfectly as a D: and E: drive (I had a 30Gb partition and a 130Gb partition, making 160Gb, not 120Gb as originally stated.)

I’m stoked about this because at the worst I can get my photos, video and mp3s onto DVD. At best, I’ll be able to get the 30Gb partition booting again, and I won’t have to rebuild the entire OS back to where I like it.

The other drive is weird… with it in makes the new IDE install boot r-e-a-l-l-y slowly and CPU usage flashes regularly in a pattern of 2-100-2-88-2-88-2-88-2-88-0-0% you can see the regular sawtooth pattern in the performance graph. When it’s high, the mouse locks up, when it’s low it’s fine. These are about 5 second intervals between each spike. Every time the CPU spikes, the disk thrashes.

Leave it 30 minutes and it calms down, idles at 2% CPU and shows just the 30Gb partition on the SATA drive in My Computer. As long as you don’t try and involve the 130Gb partition in any way (Disk management shows it, but doing anything with it starts the spiking CPU again for another 30 minutes.)

Given that one hard drive looks entirely recoverable my interest in the second is purely scientific. It seems unlikely to me that the physical media is damaged, given that one partition is fine on the drive. Does that sound reasonable? I can’t imagine I have a half-functioning physical disk because of actual physical malfunction. It seems far more likely to me that there’s something so wrong with the logical layout that it’s causing Windows to poo itself.

Still, my confidence in h/w RAID is diminished. Someone on another board pointed out that onboard RAID is about as much use as onboard sound and onboard graphics… ie. crappy.

I’m not sure how much of my situation has been caused by the RAID and how much it’s bee saved by it. Hard to tell really… maybe without it I’d be looking at some gruelling data recovery in the 5 second gaps of disk thrashing… who knows?

4

[QUOTE=h i r 0]
Given that one hard drive looks entirely recoverable my interest in the second is purely scientific. It seems unlikely to me that the physical media is damaged, given that one partition is fine on the drive. Does that sound reasonable? I can’t imagine I have a half-functioning physical disk because of actual physical malfunction. It seems far more likely to me that there’s something so wrong with the logical layout that it’s causing Windows to poo itself.
[/QUOTE]

i could be p:swear:ing in the wind here cos you seem to know much more than me about RAID but if a bad sector exists on a HDD, at say (from left to right) 7.352Gb (random location on disk) position on the HDD, the partition using that sector would probably fail eventually, i would recommend you go to your HDD manufactures website and get whatever utilities they offer (Seagate offer Seatools, Maxtor offer MaxBlast 4) and see if they provide any answers