Help: Sager NP9262 Raid Error

Hello all...

I purchased a Np9262 from Xotics back around the start of the
year, received in early May, and now it appears to have a problem.

I've got two identical 7200 RPM ST9200420AS drives in a Raid 1 mirror setup.
Yesterday I was having trouble getting AOL to work since I'm reduced to dialup while cable gets installed. AOL froze the system up and I had to do a manual shutdown and restart. Since then, the system gets to the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager option ROM v.6.1.0.1002 ICH8R w/Raid5" status screen and lists an "error occurred (0)" with one of the drives.

Raid volume status at the top shows the complete raid status as "degraded."
The system is bootable according to this as well. After the Raid status screens, a Windows menus comes up asking if I wish to boot in safe mode or other options since it cannot start normally.

Basically I know enough about RAIDs to tell the difference between 0 through 10, but not anything beyond people that say you usually swap out a drive in case of failure. So I don't know if this is something I can fix... or I need to call up Xotics and get a new drive? I can't afford to loose all the data on the system, as I've not had a chance to back the whole thing up lately (eventually going to get a NAS, I already know I have bad backup habits).

Any one had this before or can offer some advice?

 

degraded mean that you need to rebuild the array.

drive-0 is the HDD in the primary spot.

I am not sure if your drive is bad or not, you can get a HDD diagnostics to make sure there are no bad sectors in the HDD.

My RAID-1 saved my butt a while back when my old Seagate failed, I got another drive and rebuilt the array.

Although for precautions, I made an external backup before I did the RAID array rebuilding.

 

The primary is still good then.
Have a HDD diagnostic to recommend?

 

I recommend to first use the HDD diagnostics that is specific to your HDD brand.

 

HDTune is fairly good, but you need to find a utility that can scan drives that are in RAID (HDTune and most utilities will just see the RAIDed composite drive).

You might need to download something like Western Digital's or Seagate's floppy drive scanning utilities.

 

Ok - looking up Seagate's site they do have a disk check but is says nothing about being able to see through RAID.

I'll download that, and keep looking for a RAID centric solution.

But to be clear, booting into windows should "not" give me troubles
or should I be looking for a bootable disk checker and pray nothing
fries the primary?

I'm sort of handling this with a hands off attitude as I don't know what
the "bad things" to do are.

 

OK finally got a backup made and have run Seagate's DOS SeaTools, which did look at the drives individually instead of in RAID.

According to the long test "Long test – Runs a full scan of the drive. This is usually used to find and repair bad sectors." The drive passed and did not list any errors.

So should I just use the Seagate utility to do a full erase and write everything on that drive to zeros? Then see if the Intel Matrix will give me the option to rebuild the array... or set both drives back to individual non-RAID, erase, re-RAID... not sure how to reestablish the array now that Seagate's tools say it's not a hardware issue.

 

yea, just do a full wipe and rebuild the array.

 

Thanks for the help - that got it.

Write 0's across the bad drive, reboot, allow the Intel Matrix to rebuild the array, then just leave Windows on for a while (2 hours) and it is back to normal.