VIA onboard RAID (VT6410) + 4x160GB Maxtor Problem

[webwude]

Hi, everyone!

I have a weird problem.

First of all, here the system specs:
Asus P4P800 Deluxe Motherboard with Onbard VIA Controller (VT6410) - 4 160 GB Maxtor Harddisks with 8 MB Cache - 0+1 RAID.
Bios: P4P800 Deluxe Beta BIOS 1021.006
VIA Driver 5.20C

I created the 0+1 RAID one and a half years ago and never had any problems. Two weeks ago, i got some errors accessing a specific partition - the pc hanged about 5 seconds, two seconds all ok, then 5 secs hang again. After one to two minutes, everything worked ok then. I checked the partition and found 12 K in bad sectors - i was astonished, how bad sectors could occur in a RAID...

After one more week, i got an error message while booting up. The RAID Bios (?) told me, that an hdd should be synchronized. Both in bios and with the windows VIA RAID Tool, this operation failed.

Here my tries to fix this:
- first of all, i checked the hdd, metioned in bios and via tool, with Maxtor PowerMax Tool (also for warranty purpose) and connected to an ide port (since the tool didn't support raid) -> no errors (same with outer hdd connected to the same raid channel).
- i swapped the raid channels - working to channel 1 - problem hdds to channel 0 - no changes.
- i swapped the cabels connecting to the raid channel - no changes.
- i lowlevel formated the faulty hdd and try to re-install it in the remaining array - after recognizing and new boot up try to sync - same error - operation failed.

What else can i do? The harddisks are ok (according to S.M.A.R.T. and the Maxtor tool), swapping channel and / or cables - no differences. Is the controller out of order - working with 3 hdds - not anymore with 4???

Please help, any answer would be very appreciated! Any questions left? Don't hesitate to ask...
Best Regards,
ww

Screenshots:

[SaphireX]

Hi webwude

Did you ever run CheckDisk on your RAID-0 + 1 ?

The default stripe size for a RAID-0 + 1 is usually 4kb but I SEE that yours is 16kb...

Have you tried to remove both of the mirror drives and then re-create the mirror array from the source array?---- Although I am not sure if the VIA RAID Tool will allow that without destroying all data (clearing the boot sector) unlike Promise RAID Utilities that allow you to delete and create arrays without destroying data by choosing the N -method......

About the only other thing I can think of as long as you are sure that your source RAID-0 drives (Channel 1 Master and Slave if I read correctly based on the drives S/N's ) are both good would be to temporarily disconnect your two source drives from Channel 1 leaving only the two mirror drives connected to Channel 0 and boot your System with a floppy that has DBAN on it to wipe those two mirror IDE drives clean preferably using the PRNG method.

Once DBAN has wiped the 2 drives clean then re-connect your 2 source drives and with the VIA RAID Tool you should be able to re-create your RAID-0+1 array ----> since the source RAID drives are intact and the mirror drives are now empty and ripe for creation, or the VIA RAID Tool will recognize that the two drives in the mirror are empty and need to be re-synchronized.....

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Saphire