RAID 1 Failure NVraid

[shortbean]

RAID 1 Failure NVraid

I had RAID up and working fine 3 days without stress. This morning I unplugged the keyboard booted to test BIOS POST on A8N-SLI it worked fine telling me to plug it back in. But RAID promptly showed 'Degraded' and booted into windows before i could hit F-10. I don't see any reason the incidents are connected. My computer now shows 2 drives vs previous 1 mirrored drive. The drives named C: and F: (D:, E: are RWDVDs) had near exactly the 'used space' 5.57 gbs seperated by less than 10,000 bytes easily the difference from 1 boot to a non-mirrioreed drive.

Adittional info:
ScreenShot
Windows application - Nvidia Corporation / MediaShield / MediaShield use to show me the 2 drives in Mirroring / Helathy / primary / secondary / capacity status and shows me both drives. Now well you can see the screen shot. Most troubling it now shows both drives as masters.
Diskmangement under Start / Run / Compmgmt.msc well i'll just make screenshot not much there.


Rebooting... I hit F-10 to boot into NVraid set-up, from memory, I get 'NVIDIA RAID Utility April 25 2005 - Array List ' than it shows me two degraded arrays

1st) Boot - Yes / ID - 1 / Status - Degraded / Vendor - Nvidia / Array - Mirror / Name - 372.61G
2nd) Boot - No / ID - 0 / Status - Degraded / Vendor - Nvidia / Array - Mirror / Name - 372.61G

When i select an array only 1 drive shows up at a time
Array 1 / Adapt - 2 / Channel - 0 / M/S - Master / Index - 1
Array 2 / Adapt - 2 / Channel - 1 / M/S - Master / Index - 0

well maybe not from memory....

I think somehow: I, It, them, the UN or black helicopters created 2 Arrays that are mirroring to nothing. Thus, the failed 2 arrays on boot.

Solution: I assume delete array 2 and add it back into array 1. Reasons for failure? Both drives set to master? (i'll check but i doubt it. does SATA even have master / slave?) The UN seems likely at this point. Damn that Kofi Anan. Where's my tin foil hat the RAID goblins are comming. Anyone have any experience with the WD4000YR 'RAID SPECIFIC DRIVE?'



My set-up
A8N-SLI Premium
4400 AMD x2 Toledo
Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 RAID
Windows Pro SR-2
4 GBs OCZ
Seasonic S12
Plextor S-12
Sony Dual LAyer
6800 gt

[shortbean]

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Follow-up

Robert at ASUS told me to Delete and re-format both drives. Then go to Western Digital get a diagnostic program and have it write 0's to the drive make sure its clean. Than do whole reinstall. Buy an IDE Drive to back it all up. After hearing this I realized my Tin Foil Hat is way to thin so I put some tin foil on my windows no one will get my alchemy recipe or lucky charms.

Not giving up, I compiled all the info on failure and called back. I dumped 5 min tale of woe on poor Derek who was unfortuante enough to pick up. He mumbeled I needed 'stage 2 help' gave me a tracking number and I moved past the Alchemist stage [jump over rolling barrel.] The next stage seemed a little more knowledgable. Robby, not Robert, followed my tale asked a few q's. He than informed me that it is hard to find out why the arrays broke into two. We agreed to delete array 2. Re-align array 2 drive into array 1 and we bide farewell.

Results are positive so far (jpg below)... now i need to try to repeat the failure and recovery... gotta find out what Kofi is doing peeking under my tin foil.

[shortbean]

picture shows array rebuilding

[impar]

Greetings!

[Unbreakable]

[impar]

Greetings!

[andy b]

If you find out a solution to this, I'd like to know too.

I have exactly the same problem, but in my case, I got notified of a RAID problem by windows (with one of those start menu notifications - the ones that normally tell you if an update is ready to install etc.).

When I rebooted, I ended up with two identical degraded arrays, each presumably wanting a second disk to mirror to.

The machine was setup with Raid1 from the manufacturer (evesham here in the UK), and I haven't done anything to it at all.

What an irony if, as a result of spending more money to get fault tolerance on my C drive, I end up having to reinstall everything from scratch

Andy

[robnjay]

I've got the same problem, and some comments:

First of all, the nVidia "RAID Manager" should really be known as the "nVidia RAID Mangler". It is probably the sorriest piece of (garbage - I'm being polite here) that I have ever encountered.

How can _anyone_ think that it is good, proper, or logical even, to have a "Manager" of something as mission-critical as drive redundancy use Windows system-tray popups as your "interface" to the rebuilding process? Somebody should be flogged for thinking this up: System tray notifications every minute or so that say "Rebuild in progress", with no information about the rebuild at all (like maybe - percent complete?).

That is the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. I have tried to add a spare drive to my RAID 1 several times. It always makes 2 "degraded" arrays. Using "Hot Plug Array", nVidia's MMI ("Man-Machine-Interface", the GUI) tries as hard as it can to force you to DELETE ALL YOUR DATA. To succeed in rebuilding you have to trick this "MMI" (nVidia has really created more of a "Man-Machine-Minefield" in RAID Manager and in the BIOS - just try to figure out which drive will be erased!), in order not to loose your data - great "security" in their RAID 1...

Next thing everyone should know here is that nVidia nForce3 and nForce4 nVRaid's have problems with some SATA drives, expecially Maxtor and Hitachi. Is everyone in this post using one of these brands? I have 2 Maxtor 6Y120M0 SATA drives.. I've been through a Gigabyte nForce3 board and now 2 DFI LanParty nForce3 boards trying to make RAID 1 work for me (it worked for a solid month once)...

I've built several rigs for other people with SATA RAID (boot drive) based on Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 mobos, which use the nForce2 chipset - and Silicon Image 3112r RAID chipsets. I used Maxtor 6Y080M0 (80gb) drives in all those. They are working quite nicely, thank you, and are VERY fast. Have I mentioned enabling the RAID on my nForce3 cuts the drive speed in about half?? Unacceptable!!!

Lest you think I am a person who bashes nVidia, I have been using nVidia products since the RIVA days, and (up until now) stuck with them. I always use their graphics products.... It seems that nVidia has gotten so big that they now behave like a Microsoft or IBM, as if they are such a large monolithic giant that they should not have to connect with their customers in any way (nVidia Tech support? - call your OEM..). They also don't seem too interested in fixing problems lately...

[migo]

Robnjay, I built my first raid 1 on Nvidia on MSI K8NGM2-NBP. It dergaded when SATA cable came loose. Bummer. Thinking it was one of those things I reinstalled etc. Well it did it again, two degraded HD. Defeats whole purpose of Raid mirror. Reading your experience tells me this is just not up to snuff yet and i need to move on with standard install. I really wanted this Raid to work. Do you have any more thoughts on this unpleasent subject?

[redboot]

FWIW: I found this thread seeking others who've had problems with NVidia RAID 5. I installed a Win Server 2003 trial copy on a GeForce 6150 NForce 430 mobo about 5 months ago using 4 40GB Spinpoint SATA drives as bootable. Worked fine and was about to reinstall another OS when I thought, "Lets see if this fault tolerance really works."

It doesn't!

I unplugged a SATA data cable and BAM! the Blue Screen of Death! But that was the good part. I just shut down, replugged in the data cable and rebooted. Seemed to work okay; no errors reported. But I went into MediaShield and did a Synchronize (which took about 2 hours.)

Then I thought, "Okay, let's try pulling a power cable out of a drive." This time a message from the system tray popped up indicating a problem and MediaShield reported a Degraded condition and listed only 3 drives. That's more like it! But wait, at that point the system nearly froze. My mouse was active, but no hard disk activity took place at all for 5 minutes.

I rebooted, a red Degraded message came up and Win would not boot. (Funny how the GUI MediaShield doesn't seem to help when you can't boot your OS. Maybe using RAID for a boot drive is permitted, but not such a great idea?) Rebooted and used F10; seemed only option was to rebuild, but manual seems to indicate you need another spare disk for that.

So I shut down, replugged in cable and booted. No Win again. Rebooted and used F10 facility. This time I received two lines: