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Is my RAID setup causing the Windows XP badness? (random hard lockups)

Z

Zero1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 26, 2003
Messages
327
Hey all, Just got my lovely RAID gear and all my new bits put together. Installed XP, booted fine, ran fine for a bit too.

It's a Rocket RAID 1540 PCI card.

Installed some drivers, done the Windows update and now I get intermittent crashes.

I hear that XP has some sort of a problem with SCSI and RAID sometimes. It's got to a point where I even considered going back to ME.

The odd thing is, I can't even replicate the crash, it seems totally random.

Well I mailed an MS support guy, and he was unable to help me, he gave me a load of info about disabling drivers one by one, rebooting and such, which would be fine if I could get the error to happen every time.

I also mailed the Highpoint tech who manufacture the card, but no reply as yet.

Here's a copy of what I sent in case any of you are willing, or know how to sort it out :)

---------------

**Intermittent hard crashes**

Dear Support

Hello, I'm experiencing an intermittent lock up that happens seemingly randomly. When it occurs the display freezes completely and shows no signs of activity at all. Also it becomes impossible to turn off the num lock light by pressing the num lock key, and similarly, since caps lock is always off, when the crash occurs it's impossible to activate caps lock.

I've built this system myself and I'll provide some hardware specs since it may help if there is a known issue:

Athlon XP Model 8 AIUHB - XP2600+ (Default Clock speed = 12.5x166 @ 2075)
Epox 8RGA+ Mainboard, V2 BIOS
512 MB Kingston 3500 DDR-RAM 217MHz
2x 120GB Western Digital Caviar SATA150 - Model WD1200JD On Rocket RAID 1540 PCI Card (NTFS, 4KB Cluster Size, RAID 64KB Stripe Size)
1x 120GB Western Digital Caviar ATA100 - Model WD1200JB (NTFS, 4KB Cluster Size)
19" Samsung SyncMaster 957p
Radeon 9800 Nnon Pro 128MB, Defualt Clock 325, Defailt Memory 290/580
Soundblaster Audigy 2
2x Sony Floppy Drives
Liteon 16x/48x DVD ROM, Liteon 8x4x40x DVD Writer, Plexwriter Premium 52x32x52x, Samsung 8x4x32x,
Vantec Stealth 520 Watt PSU

**Currently up to date With Windows XP and Windows Update, & all newest drivers where possible**



Since I've had this problem before, I made a log of the first 3 crashes I've had since I've done a clean reinstall.

1) The first crash occured at the "Windows is shutting down" text, had a hard lockup and showed the above problems, I had just finished installing ATI catalyst 4.1 for a Radeon 9800 Non pro at the time. I had the newest RAID drivers (for Windows 2000 since the XP version doesn't have the RCM device driver) and N Vidia nForce 2 drivers for my motherboard Version 3.13

2) I've also crashed a couple of times during downloading certain Windows updates, it may have been Movie Maker 2

3) The most recent crash before submitting this notification happened by exiting MS Backup (supplied as an extra on the XP Home Edition CDROM). I was connected to the Internet at the time and had "My Computer" running in the background with the details view



I've also had a similar problem on an existing Windows XP install on my older Western Digital WDJB1200 120GB ATA100 drive, however it wouldn't hard crash like currently, it would appear to partiall freeze, allowing currently open programs to operate to a limited extent, for instance Explorer and IE6 would freeze and display oddly, I can't describe it really, it looks like when it's loading from a really slow or busy drive, but loading new programs was impossible. I pressed Ctrl, Alt, and Del repeatedly in order to bring up the task manager and it seems to still not be responding. All of a sudden it will execute all commands at once, resulting in a flood of task managers, and also single instances of previously attempted programs like Media Player 9 and new Internet Explorer windows.
This particular problem on the old drive sometimes happens upon clicking an Internet Explorer link, and a few times when clicking the "New mesages" link in MSN Messenger 6.
This was also happening before I installed my RAID card and drives, and also the Soundblaster Audigy 2.
However, I'm not too bothered in correcting the error on the old hard drive, I'm just giving you this information in case it helps.

**Possible causes?**
Rocket RAID 1540 PCI -
Well my first line of thought was my RAID card and/or SATA hard drives. I wondered if they were getting out of sync or something, but now I'm not too sure. I updated the drivers with the latest ones that Windows XP suggested at installation (I pressed F6 to install a RAID driver, it found 3 and the Windows 2000 one was selected, it also has a driver for something called an RCM device)

BT Voyager Broadband Modem-
This device seems tempermental sometimes, but I've only really had problems with it initailising sometimes, nothing of major concern. It also seemed responsible for causing my old install of Windows XP to get stuck at "Saving settings" when shutting down, some times it would be ok, but it seemed to occur if I had been on the Internet for a length of time.

Western Digital WDJB1200-
Since I had random soft lockups on my old install on this drive, I was wondering whether it was causing problems on my new install on the RAID-0 drives.

----------------------------


As you can see, I don't ususally type a lot, but I'm really fed up with it, the whole system must be less than 2 months old, and the drives and card are brand spankin' new.


Thanks for your time guys ;)
 
Truely intermittent problems are a pain in the ass
and there is rarely a simple easy solution


thats a very complex config
and the "crash" could easily be a hang that your restarting through before its over

"possible" contributing factors

Poor SCSI performance when using WinXP, or Win2k with SP3 or later

DFI LAN Party NFII UltraB review @ Lost Circuits
It is interesting here to look at the Microsoft SATA implementation rules that state that the same controller cannot have native SATA and PATA functionality at the same time if either one requires drivers, doing so will result in catastrophic failure
Click to expand...
(thanx to leukotriene for pointing that out)


consider a different PCI slot
find the PIRQ routing table for the mobo and get the card on a PCI slot that by default doesnt share an PIRQ with onboard devices (IDE, USB, AGP, NIC, ect) "probably" the last slot

simplify the problem, right now it could be almost anything, your concentarting on the last straw you loaded on the camel, while it could be the first (power is a truely intermittent source)

test the RAM

trial TaskInfo 2003
it will display CPU usage by user, kernal and most importantly Interupts, most hangs Ive experienced are actual interupt storms, that if you wait them out you can shutdown, may take several such "storms" with just a second or two in between them to properly shutdown, but then what caused the storm typically get written to the event viewer, whereas with a hard restart it isnt, not to mention the real possibility of corrupting files with a hard restart (complicating the issue, possibly beyond recovery)

there are other aps that can measure interupts, but the big blue spikes in the graph on my version of taskinfo get my attention (that and the mouse not working :p )

review > Corrupted Files!?

you may well need to start over, slowly adding to the config, that is ALOT of opticals, in the absolute worse case senerio, you may even need to manually assign IRQs

Good Luck
 
Try different chipset drivers (for motherboard). Usually things like that solve strange flukes.

As for it being a Highpoint card, my experiences with RAID cards based on the Highpoint chipset have been unsatisfactory. My on-board Promise controller on my old Asus A7V133 was awesome as far as how well it worked. I just recently built this system and I had an Adaptec 1200A RAID card laying around, which I planned on using to rebuild my striped array from my other system to I could move files over. Turns out the Adaptec card didn't support rebuilding which was totally asinine. Turns out the card had the Highpoint controller. Linux did not like it either. The GRUB bootloader wasn't having it so I couldn't boot into my Windows or Linux partitions. I had a hell of a time trying to rewrite the MBR, but once I took that card out, everything worked flawlessly. If all else fails, I'd consider a Promise card.
 
Well this sure is odd, but I think I've got it sorted.

As I may have mentioned in the original post, all drivers came with the Rocket RAID driver, and something called an RCM driver, except for the XP drivers.

I was experiencing the lockups when using the XP drivers, which installed the drivers for the channels, but not for this RCM device.

It mentions that XP should automatically install the RCM while you install the drivers, but it didnt.

So I reformatted etc. and used the Windows 2000 drivers, it seemed a little more stable than before, and it had installed 2 drivers for the RCM device.

It started playing up again, so I took a look in the properties & drivers. I went to manually install a device to take a nosy. I found 2 drivers for the RCM device (could someone tell me what it does please?) one by Highpoint that wasnt digitally signed, and one by Microsoft that was digitally signed.

So I'm currently using a mixture of drivers (not the wisest thing to do, but it seems to work so far) I left it on all night, connected to the internet while doing SiSoft Sandra's File System benchmark.

Came back to it about 6 hours later and it was still running seemingly fine. Shut down the system, and it did that same hard lockup when it says "Windows is shutting down" i can live with this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, this particular lock up was caused by my modem. i'll be running the tests again tonight, minus my modem.


Well I'll report back if it all seems to go well. I expected it to be the drivers, I once had a CMD/Silicon Image RAID card, it would work fine with the generic Windows drivers, but when I installed the supplied drivers I couldnt even get into Windows.


Thanks very much so far guys, I'm very grateful for your help :)
 
Excuse my double post, but I have some great news (well for me at least, and perhaps one or two other RAIDers).

I believe I've fixed the problem, I've tried everything, supplied drivers, latest drivers, MS signed drivers, and even generic MS drivers to no avail.

What I though was strange was how the system would install fine, and run for quite a number of hours during installing drivers and such without crashing, and then suddenly go.


What was the problem? NForce Drivers v3.13 or as it stands at time of typing this, the latest NForce chipset drivers around. I have no idea why it was going wrong with this driver.


I figured it out when installing things again on another clean install, deliverately remembering my previous actions before I got crashes. Well I installed the latest NForce drivers and it started to throw wobblers all over the place again.

So I went to bed, thought about it, and then some more, and after I got home from work I zero'ed the drives, formatted with NTFS and went through installing things again.

I used the newest RAID drivers for the card which I downloaded from the site, so I pressed F6 at install to add 3rd party drivers.

I then installed NForce v2.45 from the tempoary setup files left on my old HD, I usually delete those manually, you know the files it unpacks before it installs, good job I didn't or I'd have been fubar'ed.

So it's been on since 14:00 and it's now 21:15. Previously it would have crashed about 6 times, no exagerration. It's not even shown signs of strain.

Bizarrely, the CPU usage when running HDtach on the RAID drives has gone down quite a bit, this is responsible to the older NForce drivers.


Does anyone know what major changes from v2.45 -> v 3.13 might have happened to make my RAID not work? And also which would have been the last version that my RAID would have worked with?




Well It's a huge load off my mind, to know I didn't waste the best part of £250 or something. The results are damn satisfactory too, I would recommend RAID if you buy enough drives for redundancy, or manually backup regularly.

I'm using a 32KB stripe size in RAID 0 with 2 drives, it seems very fast for general Windows usage, a sound investment.



I think I will mail NVidia with most of this thread and see if they will address the issues in v3.13.


The Microsoft support was useless, a nice guy, and he gave me some sound tips all about clean booting, but since the problem was unreplicatable he couldn't really help me.

w00t for me for yet again fixing a problem with my computer :D
 
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