strange hard crash on an M6400

So my trusty Dell M6400 somehow crashed, hard, last night. I wasn't even there when it happened, but when I came back to my desk the system had rebooted, and was sitting at a BIOS prompt saying that no bootable device could be found, with the RAID controller indicating the status of my RAID1 array as "Rebuild". However, when I went into the RAID controller setup, did nothing, and exited the setup, the system rebooted just fine (so maybe that "boot device not found" message was simply a way for the controller to prevent the system from simply rebooting, so someone is forced to actually look at what happened). However, after rebooting the system indeed spent some thirty minutes rebuilding my RAID1 array. What makes this so particularly mysterious is that this system has never misbehaved in any way, plus there are no messages in any of the event logs indicating what might have happened. The Windows logs contain absolutely nothing, except for two errors caused by the sudden reboot itself. The first one was a Ciritcal Error, essentially saying that to Windows it looked like the system simply suddenly lost power, as if someone had pulled out the battery with the system running on battery power. The second error message was the "Improper Shutdown" message. There are also no error messages in any of the BIOS logs.

Well, the system is running fine now, but I wonder if anybody has any idea or comments what might have caused this. The only thing the system was doing when it crashed is installing a program from a CD, so the DVD drive may have been active when the crash happened, but since I wasn't there I'm not even sure of that. Oh, and the installation was not writing to the RAID1 array at all, at least it shouldn't have. In any case, the way this crash happened I am just about certain this was a hardware issue. I have never seen software cause a crash like that.

Oh, and I reinstalled the software today, after restoring the machine to the last disk image I had, without any incident. I still wonder if this was just a random one-in-a-million fluke, or a harbinger of things to come, with some piece of hardware on the Fritz.

Thanks for any input!

 

Does the RAID configuration let you interrogate the SMART data for the discs? This may show if there are any errors at the disc level.

If you have any worries then try running the trial of ActiveSMART. However, it's not infallible. It once told me that one of my HDDs was about to die but I went on for another year before I replaced it with a bigger one.

John

 

I think the Intel Matrix Manager console should provide some alert if there's SMART issues, but it didn't say anything. My feeling is that a simple hard drive failure should not have caused this kind of behavior, but who knows...

Hmm, yhis actually looks quite interesting. I think I may give this a try. Thanks!

P.S.: Jusut checked their FAQ, and they say their software does not support disks in RAID arrays. Too bad.