XP and raid cards

[Peanut]

Hi all, can anybody give me some advice please?

does any one know of a problem with raid cards and XP pro.

i have installed an iwill (highpoint) raid card in an pci slot. loaded the latest drives and update for the bios. but it would seem that there is still a probelm.

my daughter tried to open some music she had downloaded with media player, it curupted the mirror link and had to be rebuilt. i know that the extentions of the music she was trying to open "may" have been the wrong type for the windows media player. but, even so it should not have had an effect on the raid?
i am trying to get the thing to be relible and seems there could be a problem.

 

[ditchhopper]

How many drives? And were you striping as well or just building a mirror? Was it ever functioning at all or are you just trying to get it started? If it was functioning, what is it doing now when you try to boot?

 

[Peanut]

AMD 900
2 x 60gb Maxtor’s 740 udma 133
3 x 128 ram (133)
Acer cd-rw
dvd drive (Toshiba?)
rage pro graphics 32mb
15 ctx monitor
xp pro.
Hard drive caddy for spare drive, daisy chained to the main hard drive. 30gb Seagate.
The two drives set as mirror for security, if one goes the other as back up.
yes it was up and running great? She tried to open the music file and the computer froze. So reset and reboot, only to get the "control h" message from the raid card bios, to re set up, or rebuild the broken link between the two drives? She done this and all is well again.... for now.

However, I have told her not to open any music files again as it may cause it to freeze again.

One other point, when I tried at an earlier date to run ghost to make a clone of the drive using the caddy, it broke the mirror again. Rebuilding the mirror resulted in the second disk writing to the main to rebuild the link. We then ended up with the second drive as the boot or main drive?

not sure what is going on. That is why I asked the question. Is xp compatible with the raid card? I think that a new motherboard with raid on the board and a newer chipset may work better?

 

[EventHorizon]

HighPiont raid works fine with Windows XP (I ahve one of them and use it in a raid 0+1).

May well be one of the HD's is having a problem, but then how are they connected?

Do you use HD caddy's to hold all of the hard disks? If so take them out. ATA-66 and up do not work that well with caddys. I have seen several drives (not fujitsu) die because the data integrity is lost with the caddy connection.

 

[Peanut]

Thank you both, for the assistance
They are connected with new 80 wire ide cables direct to the raid card (one each). The drives are about one month old. The caddy is daisy chained to the main drive and can be switched on or off with a key, which, of course, you only do when the PC is switched off.

What is the model number of the card you are using? my one is a side raid 100.

Could this be the problem, they are designed to go up to ata100 and my drives are ata 133? I have downloaded the latest drivers so I would have thought it would be OK.

I could remove the caddy and the drive init. But, the problem she had was opening a file on the main "c" drive. Files on the spare drive in the caddy had not been accessed.

 

[EventHorizon]

ATA133 on an ATA100 card. Drivers won't help as the version of ATA is a hardware feature, but this should not cause this problem.

Have you tried the usual "chkdsk /f" command on the disk?

As for why it manages to loose the other disk....hmm, not sure why then. Unless the card is faulty, but that seems unlikley. It is possible for a blue screen to kill a raid config though.