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Urgent intel matrix smart error

X

x-man

n00b
Joined
Mar 30, 2007
Messages
16
HI, Bought 2 seagate 7200.11 500gb drives, Only had them around 2 weeks.
They are setup in a raid 0 configuration. 2 volumes ,volume 0 100gb and the rest on volume 1.
Yesterday whilst listening to some mp3's, a warning poped up saying back up all my data,
a hard drive has reported it may fail.

I downloaded seatools and burned it to a cd.
Re-booted the comp and set it to boot from cd. whilst i was in the bios i also set the sata to ide mode, previousley when using raid this was what you had to do so the tool could see your hdd. Does not affect the raid status.

Booted into seatools and sure enough a smart error had been tripped for one of the hdd's.
When i went to run a short test on the drive, a message poped up informing me the drive had reached or previousley been exposed to a temprature of or in excess of 70c.
This has to be a mistake?. The current drive temp was 30c, max ever reported was 33. Where did it manage to get to 70c, is it possable this happened before i got the drives.
They came in the usual grey anti-static bag. no box from scan.co.uk.
I proceded to run the short test, passed. i thought ok lets run the long test. Must inform peeps it took ages :( but passed. So why is it constantly moaning about a hdd fault?.

Heres where it gets strange. I re did the tests only this time i enabled the raid in bios on the off chance seatools would see the drives independantly, to my amazement it worked and i was able to test the drive again.
Instant fail right at the start with a dst unknown error. I then shut down swapped ports for the sata hdd and re-ran the test. thinking it may be a faulty port. No luck same result.

Question is why in normal sata does the drive report no faults with smart, yet when in raid there is suddenly an urgent fault. Is the smart error just informing me about the high temp once reached?. i went into the intel matrix console and reset the smart status. the warning went away for 5 mins then came back.
What do you think my problem is?. will seagate accept the drive back should i need to rma it, when in normal sata it has no faults..
 
Also just noticed it is complaining when seatools is first run of an illegal partition table c:\ on volume 0
 
I would load speedfan on your system and read the smart info directly and compare the 2 drives and see what you get.

That is the big down fall of Raid 0. If either drive fails, bye bye Raid array.

Smart failures are a pretty good predictor of Hd health, unfortunately.

Don
 
I have tryed speedfan but it didn't show any info, does it work on raid arrays running under xp x64?.
Not to bothered about losing the array as it is backed up 2 times per week.
 
Here's the fun part. You're pretty much screwed.

The Intel Matrix setup actually masks the drives, so you can't directly communicate with them using any utilities except the Intel Matrix stuff.
You ran into a firmware bug on the Seagate by sheer luck, most likely. You can ignore the "illegal partition table," as that's part of the Intel Matrix stuff. The problem with not clearing the error in the Matrix Raid is going to require a bugfix either as a BIOS flash or a driver/utility update, since it sounds like it's got it stuck somewhere. The only other option is a rebuild of the array.
 
Well i re-built the array,still no luck. As a last ditch attempt i flashed the drive to the latest ad14 firmware. Still same error though. so i have 1 drive that is ok and the other that is constantly flagging a smart error..
xp64 loads ok, however vista64 fails. this is a dual boot raid0 setup. all other programs and downloads work as normal.
The problem started when i was listening to mp3's using winamp on vista.
Lots of hdd activity for around 30 secs then intel matrix reported a drive may fail. Been like that ever since.
I have ran every test there is on the drives, one passes the other always fails.
i ran maxtor tool, heres the code it gave me.
4000fffffff4ffffff66100
Wondered if any body has ever had that return code and knows what is up with my drive.
 
Sounds to may like you need to see about an RMA on the drive. Unless you wanna be ignoring SMART errors the rest of your life. That or you can just disable SMART and just run seatools every few months to see if anything bad is sneaking up on you.

Don
 
Yes the drive needs rma. Although i might take it back the the store first and see what they say. Today i booted up the comp and had to wait for scandisk to finnish. So from shutting down last night something happened, think it was corrupted indexes.
thnx for the suggestions.
 
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