Re: Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure
- From: Jeff <Jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:28:01 -0700
Hi Paul,
"Paul" wrote:
Jeff
The first thing I'd like you to do, is tell us the motherboard
model number and the kind of Promise chip.
My immediate reaction is this. The majority of "RAID as an afterthought"
added to motherboards, are "soft" RAID devices. It is like simple IDE
controllers with a RAID overlay. It relies on the firmware Extended
INT 0x13, for booting the RAID during POST. And once booted, the
driver in the OS does something similar. The driver accesses the drives
as simple IDE devices, and does it in a way suitable for making it
look like RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored). So it is the drivers
job, to decide which disk to access and when. The hardware chip itself
is not striping or mirroring on its own. There would be no register
in the hardware, declaring the stripe size. Only the driver knows.
The chip is dumb.
So if it was my hardware, a diagnostic would be to
1) Flip to non-RAID mode in the BIOS.
2) Boot with the hard drive manufacturer diagnostic. These are
available in floppy, CD, and perhaps even USB stick versions.
The diagnostic may use FreeDOS and run the diagnostic on top of
that. By doing so, no Windows OS needs to be working.
3) Usually, the diagnostic will be read-only. If the diagnostic
has options which do writes, it should warn you it is about
to wipe out all data.
4) Some hard drive manufacturers provide no diagnostics. I'm
not sure now, but Hitachi may not have any for download.
If the diagnostic passes without throwing errors, then you know
the hardware is not busted. (Check both disks, so you know both
cables are working.) Then the problem is at some other level.
1) CMOS problem. Clear CMOS (with the power cord on the computer unplugged).
Make sure you've written down the BIOS settings before hand, as
you'll need to restore them. Very few motherboards support
"profiles" and easy restoration.
2) BIOS firmware problem. The firmware is protected by a checksum,
so if the BIOS firmware was corrupted, it should be detected at
POST by the boot block. I see little reason to be re-flashing the
BIOS at this point. The boot block starts first, and verifies the
main BIOS (holding the Promise code) is OK.
3) Metadata content of disks. When you use the RAID Setup in the BIOS,
you're writing a 64K block (reserved sector) somewhere on the disk.
My experience with my own Promise, is I suspect it may even use
metadata when in non-RAID mode. But I haven't wasted the time
proving it. When you go into the BIOS and delete the RAID array,
that too should make a change to the metadata. Whether it completely
erases the area used, or writes "ordinary IDE" in the block is something
I don't know.
4) Windows driver problem.
5) Windows installation problem. Windows will not rewrite the MBR, if
there is already a signature in the first sector where the MBR is stored.
This causes a problem on the first reboot. I don't know if partitioning
or partition types (all partitions EXT2 or whatever), would prevent
Windows from starting over again, and putting a new partition somewhere.
I thoroughly erase disks, if I'm hitting a brick wall. DBAN from
dban.org is one such tool. Linux and "dd" using /dev/zero is a more
efficient erase, and only takes me seconds to prepare a disk, by
erasing the first few megabytes. With the RAID drives, I'd probably
erase them right up to the very end, to ensure I'd wiped the metadata
block.
When you see the "unknown devices" and there are four of them,
do they appear to be identical devices ? How many hard drives are
present in the computer in the first place ? When I'm installing
here at home, I like to unplug all drives not related to the
installation, so I'm only dealing with the boot drive or boot array.
So please post what kind of motherboard this is, how many drives
are present, and where they're connected.
Paul
Finally... A few successes!
First to answer a few of your questions.
The motherboard is an Asus Socket 478, P4C88-E Deluxe motherboard. This is
the board that came with the Compaq X09 system.
If the documentation that I have for the motherboard is correct, the Promise
controller is a PDC 20378 controller. After reading through the manual more
closely, it appears that the way the HDDs were cabled on the original system
(and still are) the RAID control is actually by the Intel ICH5R chipset. (I
was confused by the references I saw to the Promise controller... now I
understand.)
If you're interested, here's a link to the Asus page which lists the user
manual download:
http://dlcdnas.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4C800E-DX/e1347b_p4c800-e_deluxe.pdf.
(It should be the last item in the list, if the link works correctly.) Here's
another link to the installation guide for the Promise controller:
http://support.asus.com/technicaldocuments/PDC20378.pdf
There were two hard drives present in the system at the time the problem
began. They were configured as RAID0. Each was attached to a connector
labeled SATA on the motherboard (one labelled SATA1 and the other labelled
SATA2).
After reading the documentation, I believe that the RAID configuration was
actually controlled by the Intel ICH5R chipset. I found that information on
page 5-33 of the motherboard manual.
Taking a step back... I attached the SATA hard drives to the SATA RAID1 and
SATA RAID2 connectors on the motherboard. I then had to enable the Promise
controller in BIOS. During POST I was given the option to configure the RAID
array using the promise controller. Following reboot, the XP setup began
again, I pressed F6 to load drivers, and when I was asked, I loaded the
Promise Fastrak RAID drivers. At the completion of this the two hard drives
were recognized (as a single volume). Great event!
Why did this happen? I was using the Promise driver when the SATA drives
were attached to the two connectors which interface with the Intel RAID
controller.
This leads me to believe that if I load the correct Intel drivers for the
RAID controller during XP setup, I will be able to see the drives during XP
install... I am going to try that next if I can locate the correct drivers.
I'll keep you posted.
Jeff
.
- References:
- Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure
- From: Jeff
- Re: Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure
- From: Paul
- Possible Onbaord RAID Controller Failure
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