Boot failure

[Daneel Olivaw]

Windows xp SP2 begins to boot, but stops when accessing /system/config and says to run system recovery from cd by pressing 'r'

I tried this but the recovery hangs at "checking disk 0 at viaraid"

I'm running a raid 0 on P4P800 deluxe with 2 80gig Maxtor HD, one ball bearing, one liquid bearing, the two drives stacked one on the other.

This has worked flawlessly for 1 year, I've hard to re-stripe my array twice (this is the second time) in one month, both of similar errors.

The only solution is to re-stripe, re partition, reformat and reinstall.

Thoughts? Why is this happening, everything else is fine. Would loosing the raid have a big impact on boot time, games and such? It's been a while...

[Daneel Olivaw]

Can low-level formats prevent further disk errors?

[saturnotaku]

Maxtor should have a diagnostic utility on its site that you can download. That would be the best way to determine exactly what kinds of errors you are experiencing. But from what you're describing, it sounds like one of your hard drives is on its way out the door.

[Daneel Olivaw]

Saturnotaku, that's what I'm fearing, I'll see tonight with maxtor powermax. Maybe a low-level format (called this by maxtor) can restore the drive to its former glory? But I'd settle for knowing which of the two drives is defective...

[saturnotaku]

A low-level format might be a band-aid solution. But depending on what the diagnostic report says, I'm guessing you'll probably have to go through the dreaded RMA procedure.

I'm not sure about Maxtor, but with Western Digital, they will cross-ship you a drive if you give them a credit card and send the defective drive back within a certain time period.

[Ninjaman09]

Yeah, I had to RMA a WD drive and I got it in like 2 days, and my drive got to them by the end of the week. That was the end of that, it was pretty painless. And yeah, it sounds like you'd better run some diagnostics because that sounds like drive failure.

[einstein_314]

hmmm. seems like a problem I had. A couple of weeks ago I was running prime95 (trying to see how high my clockspeed could go) and after a couple of minutes, I got a bubble in the task bar saying something about a corrupt system file. then I got the blue screen of death and the computer restarted. but when loading windows I got a screen saying "the file c:\windows\sytem32\config\system (system is the file - no extention or anything) is corrupt or missing. Run windows XP setup and press R to enter the recovery console." so I did this but after hours of playing with it, I gave up and just reinstalled windows. I don't think prime95 had anything to do with this problem though. I'm running 2 x WD 120 Gig SATA hard drives in RAID 0 on my A8V. Sounds like it could be the same file missing that I have. Don't know though, it does sound like you have a bad drive.

[Daneel Olivaw]

You're all very much right, one of my 80gig maxtors had some sort of error on it, Powermax says it fixed it and my hd is recertified, but just so I can do my homework without worrying too much, I'll loose the raid0 for awhile. I keep the 'faulty' 80 gig as a secondary partition.