Promise Raid stuffing up.

RobertWebb · 04-11-2005, 08:22 AM

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte GA_8IEXP motherboard, with onboard Promise Raid. I have a main HDD and two more HDDs in RAID (for video editing).

It all works mostly, but there seem to be some dodgey parts on the Raid drives now, and if I try to access those parts, all data on the Raid becomes impossible to access until I reboot. Editing video means that I have a bunch of files around the 2 Gig mark, so for example if I play particular files, they hit a point where the machine thinks for a long time, then gives a drive access error, after which I can't access ANY data on the Raid.

Is this normal? I would have hoped that a bad segment on the drive should be marked as such, some data lost maybe, but the rest of the drive should still be accessible.

My next mistake was doing a surface scan of the disk. Same problem, it stuffs up half-way through and won't boot, but now wants to repeat the scan everytime I boot. I have to make sure I'm there to hit a key every time to avoid the scan.

At this point I'm even happy to lose the Raid functionality and just have access to the two HDDs as normal drives, but I can't figure out how to do that either. During boot I can hit Ctrl+F (I think) to enter the Promise setup app, but the options are all for different types of Raid, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop using Raid altogether.

I did find the "Integrated Peripherals" section in BIOS, and noticed these settings:
"Onboard ATA/RAID Device - Enabled"
"RAID Controlled Function - RAID (other option: ATA)"
Should I change the latter to ATA? Don't want to try unless someone can confirm what this does. And will this fix the problem that accessing bad sectors (if that's what it is) will lose me access to the whole disk?

Thanks in advance, let me know if you need any more info,
Rob.

**crazijoe** · 04-12-2005, 04:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RobertWebb

I did find the "Integrated Peripherals" section in BIOS, and noticed these settings:
"Onboard ATA/RAID Device - Enabled"
"RAID Controlled Function - RAID (other option: ATA)"
Should I change the latter to ATA? Don't want to try unless someone can confirm what this does. And will this fix the problem that accessing bad sectors (if that's what it is) will lose me access to the whole disk?

To set them up as separate drives, change to ATA.
If this was set up as a RAID 0 array and you decide to change this to separate drives, all data on the drives will be lost.
If you have bad sectors or clusters on the drive, I would replace the drive. The situation will just get worst. Download the drive manufacturers disk utility and run a diagnostics against the drive.

04-11-2005, 08:22 AM	#1 (permalink)
RobertWebb Registered User Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 1 OS: Win2000	Promise Raid stuffing up. Hi, I have a Gigabyte GA_8IEXP motherboard, with onboard Promise Raid. I have a main HDD and two more HDDs in RAID (for video editing). It all works mostly, but there seem to be some dodgey parts on the Raid drives now, and if I try to access those parts, all data on the Raid becomes impossible to access until I reboot. Editing video means that I have a bunch of files around the 2 Gig mark, so for example if I play particular files, they hit a point where the machine thinks for a long time, then gives a drive access error, after which I can't access ANY data on the Raid. Is this normal? I would have hoped that a bad segment on the drive should be marked as such, some data lost maybe, but the rest of the drive should still be accessible. My next mistake was doing a surface scan of the disk. Same problem, it stuffs up half-way through and won't boot, but now wants to repeat the scan everytime I boot. I have to make sure I'm there to hit a key every time to avoid the scan. At this point I'm even happy to lose the Raid functionality and just have access to the two HDDs as normal drives, but I can't figure out how to do that either. During boot I can hit Ctrl+F (I think) to enter the Promise setup app, but the options are all for different types of Raid, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop using Raid altogether. I did find the "Integrated Peripherals" section in BIOS, and noticed these settings: "Onboard ATA/RAID Device - Enabled" "RAID Controlled Function - RAID (other option: ATA)" Should I change the latter to ATA? Don't want to try unless someone can confirm what this does. And will this fix the problem that accessing bad sectors (if that's what it is) will lose me access to the whole disk? Thanks in advance, let me know if you need any more info, Rob.