# Rebuilding RAID1 freezes computer (long)



## Tan DJ (Apr 28, 2009)

Hi,

I appologise for the length of this post, but this issue has been plaguing me for about a week now, and I've tried a few things already.

I have an aBit AN52 mobo with 2 Seagate 500gb SATA drives which I'd configured as RAID1 via the BIOS when I first built this machine a year and a half ago. (With Windows XP pro)

I have not had ANY problems with it until about a week ago, when the computer hung while using MyVirtualHome.  MVH has hung before, and the computer has restarted ok and occasionally after an MVH hang, it would perform a chkdsk on rebuild.

But just last week, when MVH hung, windows wanted to perform a chkdsk.

It completed pass 1 reasonably quickly, but when it got to pass 2 it started the index verification, but never got past 0%.  After it had been running awhile, the disk activity light stopped flashing.  after waiting about an hour, I gave up and restarted the computer, but this time, during POST the NVraid bios showed 2 raid arrays - one degraded and one in error.

So I entered the BIOS and deleted the errored  raid set, and re-added that drive to the original raid set.  Then when windows started, sometimes it would only get as far as the login screen before freezing, othertimes I could login, but it would freeze within 2 - 5 minutes.

Rebooting would sometimes show the 1 raid array in a rebuilding state, but eventually would show 2 arrays again with one in the error state.

I found that if I changed the second disk (that was being assigned to the second errored array) from being part of the raid, and deleting all partition details on that disk I could boot up windows ok without any problem, but I could not run chkdsk without it hanging on the second pass.  (including boot time chkdsk - had to bypass the boot time chkdsk to start windows.  But there was now an issue where Windows freezes during shutdown.


So eventually, I installed windows on my 80gb IDE drive, and found that I could run chkdsk of my original boot disk (currently in a degraded state) and it corrected 3 index errors.  I also got it to scan for bad sectors, but it found none.  This new install also has the problem of windows freezing during shutdown.

Now I could boot off my original install without the problems during start up.  However 
Once the chkdsk problem was solved, I thought I'd try re-attaching the second disk, and found that the computer would freeze when the resync reached about 1% complete.

I noticed that my nvraid driver is v5.10.2600.925 but that the latest version available from the abit web site is v5.10.2600.0995, so I thought I'd update to the latest driver.

On reboot, windows would now only get to the point where the Windows logo starts to fade in, and then the system would reboot.  Booting in safemode, I could see it get up to a specific driver and then it would reboot.  Sorry, can't remember which one it got up to.

At this point I was almost at the point where I thought I'd have to reinstall windows,  but I tried a couple of reboots where I selected Last Known Good Configuration, and after about 3 attempts I succeeded in getting my computer to boot - raid driver now back to 925 version.

So I removed the disk from the raid again, and this time I partitioned it and formated it from windows XP, and performed a chkdsk /r on it, and when it finished, it showed 24kb in bad sectors.

Question:  Would these bad sectors be what is causing me to have so much trouble reattaching this drive to my mirror?  And why doesn't the nvraid driver report anyh problems with that disk?.

Also, why am I having trouble with windows freezing when I shutdown?

(I'm not going to make any attempts at reattaching that drive for the time being - probably have to wait until I get a new one.)


(FYI there were a large number of messages like "The device, \Device\Scsi\nvgts1, did not respond within the timeout period." in the event log while performing the chkdsk /r, and there have been quite a few of these for the past week)


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## Deleted member 3 (Apr 28, 2009)

Seems one of the drives is bad, replace it.


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## Steevo (Apr 28, 2009)

Could be a failing controller too, however the fact that it reported any bad sectors through windows is a sign of a drive failure. newer drives have self monitoring for sectors and have a spare amount of sectors that are unreported for moving data to when it detects a problem on the disk. So it has already ran out of spares and has reverted to using disk space.


Backup and run seatools on both.


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## Tan DJ (Apr 29, 2009)

I'll have a look at seatools.

If the problem is the controller failing, what would be the easiest way to migrate to a new proper non-MOBO RAID controller?  Can I just disable the RAID on the motherboard and still access the existing disks without corrupting the data that's on there?


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## Tan DJ (Apr 29, 2009)

I just downloaded and installed SeaTools for Windows, and when I run it, I get a popup with a title "Fatal Error: Device Discovery" that says "Index and length must refer to a location within the string. Parameter name: length System.String InternalSubStringWithChecks(Int32, Int32, Boolean)"


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