So which part is failing?

W

wyzakr

n00b
Joined
Nov 27, 2005
Messages
21
System: (3 years old)
P4 (Northwood) 3GHz
MSI 875P NEO-FIS2R i875P
1GB Corsair TWINX1024-3200LLPT
2 WD Raptor 36.7GB Raid 0 (os)
ATI X850
CL SB Audigy 2 Platinum (w/ drive bay)
Pioneer Slot load DVD
Plextor Premium 52x
Sony DRU 830a
Soyo Bayone card reader
Floppy
Antec True Power True550
OLD - WD 200gb
NEW - 2 WD5000ks Raid 1

Replaced the 200gb drive with the mirrored 500 gigers for my data. Reinstalled the OS (it was time anyway) and things seemed fine.

After Ghosting the the OS partition to the the data drive(s), upon reboot, during post the Promise Fast Track Utility indicated the mirrored array had failed. Went in and could not identify which drive had failed. Rebuilt the array. (takes a looooonnnggg time) and everything was fine again.

A few OS tweaks and changes and I decided to ghost the OS drive again. Same problem on reboot, except this time it identified which drive failed. Tried a rebuild of the array and it worked again.

A few additional tidbits;
The new drives both have a manufacture date of 3/2006, which I have gleaned for many sources seems to be a problematic time period for these drives.
Each time the array failed, I also recieved a message at post that my memory timings were too tight. But that is set to pull from spd. (I don't overclock or tinker too much in the bios)

So I'm wondering, do I have a bad drive, or is the power supply maybe not enough to handle everything, or could it be something as simple as the CMOS battery and settings being lost.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
 
Interesting. Well, here's what I would do. Since it's giving you a message about your timing being too tight, I'd run memtest. It's entirely possible that your RAM is failing. Memtest will let you know. And just so you know, failing RAM can cause all sorts of horrific and hard to diagnose problems. Anyway....

If that's not the case, run some diagnostics on those HDD's. WD HDD's have sefl-diagnostics however, and they're supposed to let you know when they fail. Anyway, if you want to check that, look for something called the Ultimate Boot CD. It's a piece of solid gold for system diagnostics.

If everything still checks out ok, then we have a real mystery. If the drives have a bad history (mmm, anyone remember the Deathstar HDD's?) then RMA those drives and get some new ones.

Oh, as always, recheck the cables, make sure they're seated correctly. Countless hours of troubleshooting have been wasted due to a simple thing such as a cable being seated incorrectly, especially after switching out HDD's.
 
Seems that since the problem happens only when you ghost the OS, then maybe you should just try to install Win XP on the array from the disk instead of ghosting it. Im guessing that it isn't a hardware failure, but something to do with the Windows install or the ghosting process.
 
Alright, I have the Ultimate Boot CD. I will run those tests this evening/weekend and see what the results are.

I guess it would just be an unfortunate coincidence for memory to fail after switching out drives.

Standpoint; the ghosting I am doing is merely creating a backup image of the (already loaded) OS drive (the Raptors). I wasn't installing the OS from it. It is interesting to me though, that both times it happened, it happened after using ghost.
 
Ran the tests. 6 passes of Memtest. Extend diagnostics tests on both drives. No errors.

Spent the weekend loading all my software back on, with numerous reboots and no problems.

At some point I will ghost an image again, and I have a strong suspicion that the problem will happen again, but if it does, at this point I am comfortable in chocking it up as an anomally that happens in that particular set of circumstances.

Thanks for the help.
 
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