Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I'm having trouble with my RAID0 array (2x250GB SATA1), I think one of the drives hay be bad/corrupted* but my system freezes when the array is enabled. I'm thinking about disabling my raid adapter and running chkdsk, ect on the individual drives. Since I've never tried this before I'm worried about the effect the error correction would have on the striped data. Would there be any risk repairing individual drives and then re-engaging the array?

*My system stopped working a few days ago, it bluescreens on vista boot (I deleted my XP installation a couple weeks ago to make space until I can get some more hard drives) and when I try to use the install disk to repair the system it hangs at the end of the first progress bar "loading files". I used a MiniPE disk to boot to the system and it seems to work normally unless I load the raid driver to access my disk, then it freezes randomly after a few minutes.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by DimaYasny
Member Avatar for DimaYasny

it's impossible to test the drives in an array separately, on the FS level.
if you have a raid0, be ready to lose all data on both drives, should you lose one of them.

Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I know I can't do a file-system check, but I could do a scan for bad sectors, which would the symptom of a failed drive.

Member Avatar for DimaYasny

get a DST done on the disks. if it fails, replace the drive and reinstall

Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I can't do it on the drives as a raid array, they seem to be freezing any OS (whether it's because of data corruption, damaged drives, or defective controller I don't know). Can I do DST on the disk seperately since there would be no file system or coherent data on them? and would the data be safe when I re enable the raid functioning of my controller.

Member Avatar for DimaYasny

DST is Drive Self Test, meaning it will test the mechanoical and logical part of the drive. This test sends a set of commands to the HDD firmware. it does not touch the FS at all.
in order to keep things OS independent, you can boot from a LiveCD that has the required tests preinstalled

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