NVRaid problems - any bright ideas?

Aragorn · 12-07-2005, 11:15

About 9 months ago, I bought an ASUS K8N (NF3 250) mobo as part of a new A64 system. Originally I bought a Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Sata 160Gb drive.

A month or so ago I spent a frustrating weekend upgrading my system to include a second Sata drive (DiamondMax 10 160Gb) in a Raid 1 config for data protection (had to reinstall XP (SP2) and restore data), but I figured if my data is safe it's worth the initial pain.

Last night I hibernated my system as per normal and this morning it refused to boot.

First I knew was an error reporting vga.oem (?) missing or corrupt. I rebooted and spotted the NVRaid bios reporting my Mirror in DEGRADED mode - I hit f10 and both drives were present. I decided not to rebuild - as both drives are healthy why is it saying degraded and how would it know which to rebuild off!

Booted off the Windows XP CD to try and locate the file, but didn't get very far. XP Recov seemed unable to read off the CD to get the 'missing' file.

A couple of reboots later, NVRaid magically decides, without intervention, that the mirror is healthy. Windows then spots the hiber file and asks to delete this and reboot normally. At this point, boot.ini is read normally but trying to start XP give 'hal.dll' missing or corrupt. Recovery console confirms that both hal.dll and ntoskrnl are present.

Also tried unplugging one of the drives - its a mirror and SHOULD boot off one drive (at least thats what I paid for) - but NVRaid fails to start the array if either drive is unplugged - ergo I think both drives are working.

So, wtf is going on and now do I get the system back up without losing the data that NVRaid is supposed to protect? Does the MOBO need RMAing?

TIA for any bright ideas.

Jon M · 12-07-2005, 11:25

What bios revision is your motherboard running on?

Aragorn · 12-07-2005, 11:30

1006- the latest non beta version, afaik.

Jon M · 12-07-2005, 11:37

I'm a bit concerned that the Raid setup consists of two non-identical drives.
Granted they may be the same size, but one is a different model to the other, I'll do some reading up on the significance of this.

Aragorn · 12-07-2005, 14:43

Looks like it might have pulled through!

Ran Chkdsk under the Recovery console which appeared to cleanup some errors, then repaired my Recovery XP installation on the spare partition. This enabled me to see that ntoskrnl had been corrupted on the primary partition and I was able to copy it from the SP2 cab version.

Primary XP partition has now booted and NVRaid reports it is rebuilding the mirror.

Once that has finished I will try disabling the 'tagged queuing' feature that has been linked to NVRaid corruption elsewhere.

Jon M · 12-07-2005, 15:09

Good stuff

Lets hope it behaves itself for the forseeable future

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You may need to replace a drive though, if the errors are caused by bad sectors.