Re: BSOD after installing new WD3200AAKS drives -why ?

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eatmoreoats wrote:
Hi,

I just replaced my hard drives with 2 new Western Digital Caviar SE16
WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb drives from Newegg.
They are installed as a RAID 0 mirror pair using the mobo's nVidia
Chipset RAID controller. During XP install I hit f6, stuff my floppy
with the raid drivers in etc and the install works fine. Then when I
come to boot XP I get a blue screen of death with a STOP 0x0000007B
error (about removing any newly installed hard drives or hard drive
controllers etc).

Whats the most likely cause ? Is it a h/w incompatibility issue ?
Driver issue ? A bad drive ?

I've a ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe mobo. Prior to these WD3200AAKS
disks, I had a pair of Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB
7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb disks in raid 0 which worked ok.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Dom

You can:

1) Get the disk drive manufacturer's test software, and test each
drive individually. The software may fit on a floppy or a USB
stick. This will give you some idea if each drive is OK.

2) When connecting a new set of disks, if you want to RAID two
drives, enter the RAID BIOS (go to BIOS and use the magic
key press to enter the RAID subsection). Declare the array
in there. That will install metadata (reserved sector) declaring
that the disks are an array. The Nvidia RAID driver and the BIOS
INT 0x13 will read the reserved sector on each disk on subsequent
boots, and know what to do.

3) RAID 1 is a mirror. RAID 0 is a stripe for speed (double bandwidth).
In RAID 0, if one of two drives fail, the data is lost. In RAID 1,
if a single drive is lost, the other one still works (redundancy).
Make sure you're declaring the array type you actually want.

4) Nvidia Mediashield supports "migration" from one array type to another.
You could, for example, install one hard drive, set the ports to RAID
mode in the BIOS. You don't need to declare an array type for the single
drive (and if doing this now, you'd need to "Delete" the existing array
while the two disks are still connected). Press F6 and install RAID driver.
Install the OS. Reboot at least once to prove it all works. Shut down
and install the second disk. Boot up into Windows. Use the RAID management
software in Windows to perform a migration. Then, the data from the one
drive, will be copied to the second for a mirror. If going from single drive
to RAID 1 mirror, the size will not be an issue (same available storage
space as before, as it is a mirror). The Mediashield manual should have
a table of allowed migration types. (I think there is also a 6.1 version
of manual on the site as well.)

NVMediaShield_UGv6.pdf `1.64MB
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32130.html

Inaccessible boot volume 0x0000007B could mean a couple of things. A mismatch
between what is in boot.ini and where the array is located. Or a problem
with the driver not being the right type for the disk setup (RAID versus
non-RAID driver). That kind of thing. Your problem probably is not a
hardware problem, but something like that. I'm guessing, that perhaps you
forgot to set up the array, and have only installed to a single disk or
something. But you can still do a quick test with the hard drive
diagnostic software anyway, if you want.

Once you start using RAID, if you want to use the disks independently at
some point in the future, you need to remove the reserved sector information.
"Delete array" in the RAID BIOS, would be one way of doing that. Occasionally,
a poster installs disks in a computer, and cannot understand why they
are operating strangely. It turns out, that some experiment they did last
year, left RAID reserved sector information on the disk, and the driver
or BIOS can pick that up and use it. "Delete array" can return the disks
to operating singly again.

HTH,
Paul
.

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