RAID Disk Check

S

swflbatth

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 13, 2004
Messages
108
Is there a utility that I can use to check my SATA drives for corruption/errors while they are in a RAID? The Maxtor utility does not work with RAID. Someone help a man out here. Or suggest a way that I can test my drives w/o losing my data.
 
It sounds like you want to do a consistency check on your data that is IN a raided volume. Do not try to do any kind of checks or drive utility work on an individual drive or you will lose your data. Most raid cards have a way to do this with their software (it will be called a consistency check or verify or something similar). If you have no such tool, then you need to just use a Windows tool (I assume you are using Windows), that addresses the entire drive letter/volume as a whole, and NOT individual drives. If this is your situation, then I am not sure actually what would be the best utility because my raid sets have always been on a hardware card having a utility for this. Theoretically, any utility that would force the array to read all the data in the array, would cause the raid software to check for correctness of the data blocks along the way, but this is probably dependent on the implementation. Some software based raid drivers might not check the parity bit unless something occurs to make it think there would be an error.

I am afraid we need more details about your implementation to help. What are you trying to check exactly, example, physical platters ok, bad blocks in the raid, or what. Do you have a hardware or software raid. If you say it is hardware, is it a real hardware solution or one of those cheap onboard solutions that do it at a driver level and are thus software solutions in disguise (i.e. what type of card are your drives attached to). What O/S are you running, etc.
 
Yeah the raid card should support it's own form of checking, i'd check the manual or post your raid card.
 
Its a software raid, set up using the onboard nvraid controller on my motherboard. When I go into the RAID utility at start up there arent any options for me to select to analyze the sector. All I am trying to do is determine if my hard drives could be contributing to some problems I am having posted in this thread. Namely the so called corruption that is present. I am thinking it is motherboard related and I am RMAing the mb, but I was wanting to find some way to check the disk. While I could still boot to windows I was able to run scandisk and it didn't detect anything (xp pro btw). For the full options it required a restart and would do a full scan at startup, but I haven't been able to boot into windows since.
 
I am not an expert but ck the bios settings. my settings did chg for some reason and the bios was not setup for the raid settings. I cpuld not boot into windows. My raid config didnot show up on the setup screen before the windows loaded, that was my first clue
 
Well right now I am to the point where I cannot even get to the BIOS. The system doesnt post; all of the fans turn on, etc, but nothing shows up on the screen. Occasionally if I try to turn it on it will let me get into the BIOS, but before it gets there I see the raid utility saying that the raid array is detected and is "healthy".
 
Ok, well I took out one video card, that didnt help, but leaving it out, I took out one stick of RAM. The system booted and scandisk worked fine saying there was no detectable problem on the hard drive volume. So right now I am not sure whats going on. I had run memtest for over 5 passes and the memory was just fine. But I guess this is not a hd problem anymore so I will move along to bother some other peeps. Thx for your time though.
 
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