RAID Controller Failure?

[Del Valle]

So about a week ago my Computer out of nowhere starting to have extreme slowdowns on start-up. Things that would take the computer a second or less to do on start-up were taking 10 minutes or longer. I kinda lieft it alone for a day or two, turning it on to see if there's any change. One day I saw a little popup notice from the hard-drive icon on the taskbar that said something about a "RAID Controller Failure". Soon afterwards my computer went back to normal, though it may be just be my imagination, but it seems a bit slower.

Can somebody tell me what happened and if it is serious?

[irishron]

Run an deep virus scan lately? How about malware? You could have caught something.

[Del Valle]

This was my first thought and I ran a deep virus check. Took my computer 2 and a half hours to finish and it didn't find anything.

[irishron]

Have you run this? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb897445

[Del Valle]

Have you run this? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb897445

Thing's for XP, I have a Vista. I'm still pretty certain it's not a virus.

[irishron]

Have you tried Malware bytes in Safe Mode.

I think the last time I ran the Rootkit program was Vista.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Check your error logs in the MMC.

[Del Valle]

Check your error logs in the MMC.

Okay I found some errors that apparently were caused by "disk" that said "The device detected a controller error \Device\Harddisk2\DR2". I also found another error that originated from the "cdrom" that said "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\CdRom0". These events seem to be around the time I experienced my problems.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Are these SATA or IDE drives, and is one of them on the same channel as the CD-ROM?

[Del Valle]

Are these SATA or IDE drives, and is one of them on the same channel as the CD-ROM?

You lost me.

[irishron]

Are these SATA or IDE drives, and is one of them on the same channel as the CD-ROM?

You lost me.

It's been too long for me to help out on this one.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Ok there are two main hard drive types, SATA and IDE. IDE is the older, its the one that has those big flat ribbon cables that look like this.

SATA has cables that look like this.

SATA only allows one device connected to each channel, each plug on your mother board.

IDE will allow two devices connected in series to each channel, but there is a maximum of 2 channels on your board, so a max of four devices.

Since you have errors reported on two different devices, if you are using IDE drives and have a hard drive and a CD-Rom connected to the same channel, there might be a common problem affecting them both like a bad cable or even a bad channel on the board.

Or it might have just been something that glitched for a while like a bad registry entry that got written over again at some point. In your error log did anything say SMART failure or something similar?

[Del Valle]

Ok there are two main hard drive types, SATA and IDE. IDE is the older, its the one that has those big flat ribbon cables that look like this.

SATA has cables that look like this.

SATA only allows one device connected to each channel, each plug on your mother board.

IDE will allow two devices connected in series to each channel, but there is a maximum of 2 channels on your board, so a max of four devices.

Since you have errors reported on two different devices, if you are using IDE drives and have a hard drive and a CD-Rom connected to the same channel, there might be a common problem affecting them both like a bad cable or even a bad channel on the board.

Or it might have just been something that glitched for a while like a bad registry entry that got written over again at some point. In your error log did anything say SMART failure or something similar?

Err, I don't remeber exactly what type I had, its been a couple of months since I've looked inside. I think it might be the IDE one.

I looked in the error log, and I didn't see anything that said SMART as a source.

[Lord Baal]

Err, I don't remeber exactly what type I had, its been a couple of months since I've looked inside. I think it might be the IDE one.

I looked in the error log, and I didn't see anything that said SMART as a source.

Well I think is time you go in there again and seize the chance of getting help here. It would help a lot if you tell what's your hardware made of.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Err, I don't remeber exactly what type I had, its been a couple of months since I've looked inside. I think it might be the IDE one.

I looked in the error log, and I didn't see anything that said SMART as a source.

If the problem went away, and you dont have any SMART errors, I am going to assume the problem was a RAID 0 congifuration that didnt write something correctly for some reason (power failure?) and then had to rebuild itself. Rebuilding an array usually takes several hours if you have a substantial amount of data involved, and if you are actually using the computer it could take quite a bit longer. So if your machine is only powered on when you use it, and you are trying to use it while it is trying to rebuild, it could easily take a week or more before things get sorted out.

Keep an eye on the error logs for more drive issues, and maybe try some of the free drive fitness tests out there. If something happens again we can help you nail down the problem but if things are back to normal I dont know how how much we can really help here if there are no actual hardware failures.

[Doono]

Well first question first, do you have a raid configuration on your system? If not enter your bios and ensure that anything related to raid hasn't been enabled.