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All right, this question goes out to all of you who use a striped array.
I have 2x60GB Maxtor SATA HDDs. I run them in RAID 0 via my onboard SATA Raid Controller (Abit NF7-S Rv2). My problem is, I can't defrag nor run any kind of checkdisk on this configuration. When I try to run defrag, it sits there at 0% for hours on end. I tried installing Diskkeeper and I get the same activity. Tried running disc check and I get something telling me it needs to access all files and to restart (even when I reboot it gives me the same). I may just boot into DOS and run chkdsk on it.
I heard from somewhere that if you cluster size is anything different than 4k (mine is 16k) that you'll have problems with defragging software. I was also going to flash my bios last night seeing as they have an updated raid controller version but the damn floppy disk I have must be bad (keep getting I/O errors on startup).
Oh yeah, on more strange scenario I recently had that I was hoping someone could shed some light on. To really understand this I'll have to tell you how it happened like a story, so bear with me.
My system details are at the bottom, do you get an idea of what I have. I used to have 2x512MB Mushkin PC3200 sticks. I had the two drives set up perfectly and everything was fine. I started getting strange crashes to the desktop and this is while my system was OCed, so I backed off the FSB and kept getting them. I noticed that my system was failing the POST memory test. I pulled out both of the 512MB individually and one of them at least appeared to be bad (as I would get no memory test failure and no crashing programs in Windows when it was out). Here's where the weird part comes in. Soon afterward, I took this module to a friend's house and it works perfectly fine in the computer I built for him (MSI Ktv4 board). I'm thinking that chip just can't handle the FSB, so I take it home and stick it back in, lower the FSB and my memory failure goes away. I decide to wipe the slate clean and reformat. Get through the XP setup and the first time it goes to boot from the HDD, I get nothing. Nodda, just a black screen. I'm guessing there is a problem with the memory, so I pull the stick out and it boots fine. I'm really needing this 512 stick because at the time I'm into SWG and this game is one huge memory eating hog. This is where is gets really weird. After playing with my drives, I noticed that with both memory sticks in, I could boot from Windows fine as long as I didn't have them in a RAID array (mirrored or striped). I'd have to physically unhook one drive or the other and install windows on only one HDD. Windows booted fine, no memory failures...problems, etc... Although, as soon as I hooked the other HDD back up and put them in a RAID array, tried to install XP on the array... same old crap. No boot at all from the SATA controller. I tried calling A-bit at one time, but I got some arabian guy who couldn't understand what I was saying (and I couldn't understand him). He just kept blaming it on Windows, so that was the end of that. Sorry if I'm rambling, but this is just very strange to me that this memory stick works perfectly fine when the HDDs are not in a RAID array, but when you put them in an array it goes nuts all over the place. It can also be said that the HDDs function fine in their array without that stick in (which is how I have it now).
Strange, eh? Any ideas?
Athlon 4200+ X2 @ 2.2 GHz | Asus A8N | 1x250GB SATA WD | 7900GTX | 512x2 Corsair PC3200 3-3-3-8 | NEC3500A 2.18 |
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