Maktube

Hey all, I'm posting this here because, while I'm really not sure exactly what is wrong, I suspect it has to do with RAID arrays or at least hard drives.

I built my own PC and also built one for a friend, and they've both been having the same issue. They both run Vista Home Premium x64, and they are both using a two-disk RAID 0 array with 7200rpm Western Digital (hers might be Seagate) hard drives. At first, both of them were fine. Mine is, or was, when I built it a year ago, fairly top of the line-ish, as I game a lot. My friend doesn't as much, so hers was more of a budget affair, and thus the only things they have in common are the operating systems and the RAID arrays.

Both computers worked fine at first, but first mine, and then hers, have been slowly dying, for lack of a better word. It seems like the operating system is slowly getting corrupted, things like the search indexer will stop working properly (or at all), or the control panel doesn't come up anymore, or things requesting permission through UAC results in explorer failing, or the computer freezes when you try to use windows update, or other things of that nature. I've wiped the arrays with killdisk, and it always comes back, and usually not the same way twice. It culminates in most of the OS and installed programs just failing to work at all, leading to a wipe and reinstall, and the whole thing starts over.

I've tried to find out what's wrong, to no avail, and I'm loath to start swapping out parts, since that's expensive, and I don't know which ones to swap out. I suspected the hard drives themselves at first, but FOUR HDs failing the same way seems unlikely... Also, it could be software, or the RAID controller (the RAID is motherboard raid on both of them, of the nVidia variety), or god knows what.

So, having heard my Ballad of Woe, any advice? I have the feeling that there's something obvious that I'm missing, and I'll end up kicking myself repeatedly when I find out what. In any case, thanks for your time and perusal.

manic

List hardware specs, including power supply wattage and brand.
If it were me, I would dump the raid config,,and vista.

Maktube

Hey, sorry for not posting sooner, I've been away from home for a while. I think the psu for both computers is an antec, mine is 1000w, I think my friend's is around 600 or so. I'm running an intel quad core Q9450 on an EVGA 780i FTW motherboard, two Nvidia 9800 GTX+s, SLIed, and 4GB of RAM. My friend has an AMD Althon 64 X2 Dual Core @ 3GHZ on an ASUS motherboard with 4GB of RAM also.

As for dumping Vista and the RAID, I plan on switching to windows 7 and getting some better (read: bigger) hard drives as soon as I figure out what's going wrong. I'd hate to spend a bunch of money on the HDD only to find out that I ALSO need to swap out the MB or psu or something.

Thanks for the help!

Edit: I can get better specs on my friend's computer if needed (exact power supply and HDs), but the fact that we're having the same issue with different hardware makes me thing very specific specs won't help much.

Edit edit: I left out an important detail! When the trouble starts up after being better for a while (usually because of a wipe/reinstall) the computer in question will start wanting to run CHKDSK periodically at startup. At first, it doesn't find anything, but as things get worse it starts finding a lot of errors and 'fixing' them. o.0

raptor_pa

HD make and model numbers, if it is Raid0 it could well be one of the drives, not both - have you tried two independent drives rather than the raid? First thing to do is dl the HD manufacturer's bootable diagnostics and check the drives with that to see if there is a physical problem on one of the drives.

RRO

I would suggest you not to do it by yourself. there are plenty of prof. who will do it for you for no money (the diagnostic part) - for example :
www.raid-recivery-online.com
when i contacted them, they diagnosed my problem for free (online).
I believe it may cause more troubles then benefits doing it by your own.