raid controller in Vista

[VJ]

Hello,

I'm experiencing a weird behaviour of my raid controller (Promise SX4300) in Vista (sp1, no other updates yet). When I hibernate the system, just after the screen goes blank, the third drive on my raid (it is a raid 5 with 3 drives) sends out an alert: its led lights red, controller beeps continuously. I have no alternative but to power it off (even reset doesn't work). When rebooting, the raid bios shows that the raid is functional (no alerts, not in a critical state). Any suggestions on solving this?

The second problem is that I cannot install the Promise utility (webpam) in Vista. Looking at the release date of it, it might well be an pre-vista version, but they released nothing new. Is there software that allows one to see the raid status (e.g. what is the "raid console" that vista installed automatically when I installed the driver)?

Thanks!

Jörg

[Chucky Cheese]

this is so wierd....1 of my raid drives just failed, it's a wd 500gb/16mb/7200

...temporarily i have unplugged data and power but have not deleted the raid setup in the controllers bios and disabled secondary sata controller in the mbs' bios...i should be good to go until i can get a replacement.

CC

[VJ]

I just noticed it was not the 3rd drive that gave the alarm... It was the fan-alarm in the raid cage...


Jörg

[Chucky Cheese]

mine is a physical failure(...click of death)...no initialisation

and now for something really wierd...since i had a good backup i decided to create a raid 0 with the other 2 drives...i create the raid in the controllers setup, save and exit...bring up vista 64 bit /w sp1..create a simple volume, ntfs @1TB, quick format and it is ready to use...but once the pc sleeps after 2 hrs. and i wake it up, windows tells me that i have to format this drive before i can use it...i decline...i then reboot and the raid configuration is gone...i recreate with the same parameters and then boot vista and it is ok...data and all!

WTH?

CC

[VJ]

Weird... bios does not prevent writing to the mbr? (just reaching here....)

Mine now doesn't go into hibernate anymore; it just reboots... AAARGGHHHHH (I need hibernate as it is the most convenient thing to do if the ups runs out of juice).


Jörg

[Chucky Cheese]

my controller is the marvell 6.xx built into the MB...

i am now 100% certain that vista 64 bit is in direct control of this piece of hardware...here is how i got there...

when i woke the pc up this morning and logged on, windows said i needed to format the disk, i decline...both drives are now seen in disk manager as two individuale drives..one is healthy and one is not. i reboot...the raid config in the controllers banner is gone...so i go into the setup and re-create the exact same raid setup, exit and boot vista 64 and it shows up...data and all...after verifying file use, i reboot...guess what! the raid configuration in the banner is gone!...

i am zeroing in on the virtual disk service. it almost seems as though this problem is related to the power management architecture of my particular setup?

CC

[Chucky Cheese]

...i forgot to add that this did not start until i was reduced to a 2 drive raid 0 from a 3 drive raid

[Chucky Cheese]

...well, i woke the monitors(..off at 2 hrs and never on the sleep option) up this morning and the disk did not need to be formatted

...there's something wierd happening...where to start?

cc