tsunade

Hey all computer super techs I have a weird problem so I offer it to you so you may kick me in the butt Here it is, I just put together my custom pretty machine and did a RAID SPAN (jbod) array with two hardrives *one a WD Raptor and one storage* then split them into two drives while installing XP Pro SP2. I got everything installed fine and most of my files transfered from the other machines and installed Pc-cillin 2002 which came with the software bundle. I was annoyed at a small slowdown in startup speed so I un-installed the Pc-cillin and decided to do a scandisk of my c: why I don't know.... it asked to restart so scandisk could scan all of the drive so I did that, scandisk finished, restarted and went into windows but I thought the startup seemed odd so I re-started the machine... then this happened it said it couldn't find the hardrives?? maybe? I couldn't access the raid tool or my BIOS or do anything in general, I was very freaked out and really I had no clue as to what the messages meant! I panicked and turned off all the power to everything for a couple of minutes, then back on and started the machine up and oddly it it was returned to normal, just now XP loads twice as long as it did WITH Pc-cillin installed So what did I do *you may now kick my butt, and use the fitting language* How do I fix it and return the pre Pc-cillin speed?

Also a question I've been thinking about. Do I actually get the Raptors full speed with the setup I have?

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MiniTokyo

LenMiyata

Grumble Grumble Grumble

It sounds as if the scandisk tried to do a sector repair, and got confused on your virtual disk vs. the actual physical hard-disk sectors. This is going to be difficult to recover from. If some of the boot files were damged from the improper shutdown, you may need to boot from you XP installation CD and use the repair installation option. You did install the XP RAID drivers at the start of the installation (which can only be done via floppy disk...) and not afterwards...

Let's see now... JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) appends multiple hard drives into a single pseudo-hard disk. (A simple concatination with no interleave). You then take this appended pseudo-hard disk, and partition it into two virtual drives??? What's the Point? If you wanted two seperate drives, you should have ignored the JBOD, turned off the RAID and have two physical hard-disk drives...

Now if you wanted to increase the disk drive performance, then you need to set up the hard disks in a RAID 0, where data is interleaved between both disk drives, and disk read/writes are done at the speed of two drives instead of one. This does have the risk of increased drive failure, as a problem in either drive results in the loss of drive data. Also RAID 0 is only practicle when both hard-disk drives are roughly the same capacity...

There is also some debate about the usefulness of software RAID systems. As outside the synthetic Disk I/O test applications, the real world performance in game play using a RAID array only shows negligible improvement according to some website reviews...

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tsunade

Yeah I'm not to familiar with RAID... I did the array originally because the drives are SATA and I couldn't get them to work without a RAID array, I know now it was stupid but when I realized my mistake I had already transfered over 50 gigs of information. I did however load the RAID drivers in the XP installation with a floppy so at least one thing is right! I don't think anything was damaged in the power off, the computer was not in windows *it refused to find the drives at all* and I turned the case off first, but why did draining the power off the case fix the problem anyway? Sorry I'm just not understanding this, but I do see why the scandisk was a mistake I think I'll avoid that from now on. Windows does start now it's just alot slower so will repairing the XP installation fix the startup speed? Should I just start all over? That's not really a fun thing but if I did it wrong from the base up...

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MiniTokyo

maverickvns

you should definitely start over and repartition your drives since you have no use of using jbod and you're mulitplying your risk of losing your data without even a performance benefit.

a possible reason why it worked after a cold boot is that it might've discharged any remaining charge from the ram or the cmos since turning off the comp from just the button really only makes the mobo stay in standby.

tsunade

OK I give up... it was working then not working then working, then not working I'm going to overhaul it, just one question is the data on the drives unsavable? I thought once you deleted your array it is gone for good? Also how do you set up SATA drives without an array? I know these are beginner questions that's why I'm asking the masters!

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MiniTokyo

LenMiyata

Grumble Grumble Grumble

There should be a RAID controller BIOS option to setup the SATA drives with no Array, No Interleave, and No mirroring. (In other words, two plain drives...) Then each one would need to be formated seperately. Which controller are your using... (NVIDIA chipset???). A visit to the maker's website should be able to dig up a FAQ document on how to do this...

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tsunade

Thanks! I think it's working now and the correct way and even though there seems to be no speed change it's running. My motherboard is the Asus A8V deluxe using the Via chipset, it took me awhile to figure it all out but each drive is now formated and XP is installed, I did lose some data though but nothing I can't live without. I would like to still speed up the startup times so any suggestions?

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MiniTokyo