Matrix RAID failure on P35-DS3R

[sprog123]

Hi guys,

I'm having a very weird problem. I had been running a Matrix RAID setup on a Gigabyte P35-DS3R for a while now without any problems using two 320GB Maxtor (Seagate 7200.10) drives with 2x20GB in RAID0 for OS and apps and the remaining 300GB for RAID1.

I went to go turn on my computer again one day and at the RAID BIOS screen, it showed 2 drives detected, but would fail after detecting the first drive where it shows its name and port. I tried swapping ports around, and found that one of the drives would cause this boot failure. It would hang with '23' in the upper right corner and kept me from even being able to enter any BIOS as the bootup hasn't finished yet.

I had an old non-RAID drive lying around which had an old image of my OS on it and was able to boot to that after I moved the 'bad' drive onto the Gigabyte SATA port. Windows now booted and detected the drive fine on the Gigabyte port. It got past the Intel RAID BIOS screen and showed my RAID0 as failed of course, and RAID1 as degraded. In Windows, I could see the RAID1 data, and the 'bad' drive showed up in WinXP disk manager utility. The partitions were weird of course, but I reformatted it and even ran a full scan on it with SeaTools and it came out clean.

I can now plug the drive back into the Intel SATA ports, and it will detect it fine and I can boot normally again using my spare drive. However, when I get back into Windows on my spare drive and try to rebuild to the 'bad' drive, the Intel storage console says, "The volume cannot be rebuilt to the selected hard drive due to one of the following reasons:
- The hard drive contains system files or is a system hard drive
- The hard drive is not large enough to be used for the rebuild action
- The hard drive has reported a SMART event
- The hard drive has reported a failure."

Has anyone seen this problem before? The drive alone seems to work fine now and scanned with no errors, but I can't rebuild my RAID to it for some reason. I'm not about to trash my entire RAID setup just yet as my RAID1 data is still there hanging on the good drive. I'm also afraid to RMA the drive as I've heard Seagate sometimes will send you refurbished drives or drives of larger capacity. Ideally, I'd want to get an identical drive back, and even if I did, there's no guarantee the that rebuild problem won't go away and now I've just RMA'd my perfectly good drive for a refurbished one.

I'm all out of ideas now. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[DvBoard]

See what the SMART event is. Sounds like the hard drive is on the way out.

 

[sprog123]

How do I see the SMART event? I got the trial version of Everest Ultimate and looked at the SMART data there and everything listed says either value is normal, or always passes.

Note that the 'good' drive that's still part of the RAID1 doesn't show up in SMART data since the RAID drives get turned into logical drives, but since the 'bad' drive is no longer part of the array, I could see its SMART data in Everest.

Like I said before, I ran full diagnostics in SeaTools on the 'bad' drive. It took a few hours to finish, so I'm thinking it did a full sector surface scan. It reported no errors. The drive appears to be more or less working fine now, just that the Intel controller refuses to rebuild to it. I'm wondering if all the problems are with the Intel controller freaking out rather than the drive going south since the Intel controller was locking up during BIOS POST trying to detect the drive, but the Gigabyte controller was fine. I got both drives only a few months ago, but I guess anything is possible.

Is there any way to 'clear CMOS' on the RAID BIOS like you can with the motherboard BIOS? Maybe something is stuck or corrupted in the Intel controller BIOS that just needs to get reset.