RAID 1 - Staus changed to "VERIFY" after BSOD crash.

[AndyBlair1972]

Hi everyone,

I was on the telephone to a helpline guy at Ubisoft enquiring as to why one of their games (Hawx) was freezing up when I ran it on my PC. One of the things he told me to try was to go into run/msconfig/startup and shut down all the programs that were listed there. I was then to try and load up the game. When I did this, I got a BSOD and the PC attempted to reboot but only managed to hang pre-bios with all the fans spinning really fast. I hit reset which also failed to restart the system so I eventually held in the power button and switched the PC off. This did the trick and the PC booted up with the usual 'Windows recovered from an error..." message. On subsequent reboots, I have noticed that my RAID 1 array status has gone from "OPTIMAL" to "VERIFY". There doesn't appear to be any evidence of a problem as the PC is working fine as far as I can tell.

Am I right in saying that "VERIFY" means the PC is verifying the RAID array itself following the BSOD and that the status will eventually return to "OPTIMAL" assuming it doesn't find a problem - or is there something I need to be doing?

I have an ASUS Maximus Formula, Q6600 Quad Core 2.4GHz @ 3.0GHz, 4GB Ram, Windows Vista X64(SP2), Adaptec RAID adapter with 2X Samsung Spinpoint 500GB HDDs (In RAID1), ATI Raedon HD 3870X2 and an LG 'Multiblu' Blueray/HDDVD/DVD ROM.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

Cheers,

Andy

 

[sub mesa]

You were possibly writing when you had the problem of your PC not responding anymore. This can lead to some data being written to drive A but not to drive B.

So to fix this, it must 'synchronise' the array again and will correct any wrong bits. Generally, this process is straight forward and you don't have to do anything. However, know that things can go wrong with this side of RAID. Why is a bit technical, but eventually it all depends on the quality of your RAID drivers. Note that RAID drivers can cause your system to BSOD too. Generally for windows i do not recommend using RAID if you can avoid to as it might save you alot of trouble.

Also, a RAID1 is very vulnerable. Its great for uptime protection of a webserver; but in your case having a backup might be more valuable than using RAID1. Remember that RAID is NOT a backup and can never protect against the dangers a backup CAN protect against.

 

[AndyBlair1972]

Thanks very much for the reply. After my initial panic, I downloaded the storage manager software and could see what was going on and how long it was going to take. The system has indeed sorted itself out and Raid status has been restored to "OPTIMAL".

I must admit, it's not the first time I've considered ditching the RAID in favour of an easy life. After all, I have a perfectly good portable USB drive and plenty of blank DVDs...

The last problem I had with RAID was when I deactivated and uninstalled Daemon Tools Lite. After I rebooted the PC, the Raid drivers re-installed themselves and the RAID status went to "DEGRADED". I managed to rebuild the array but really, that episode just seemed bizarre and it all just seems a bit unreliable to me now.

Thanks again,

Andy

You were possibly writing when you had the problem of your PC not responding anymore. This can lead to some data being written to drive A but not to drive B.

So to fix this, it must 'synchronise' the array again and will correct any wrong bits. Generally, this process is straight forward and you don't have to do anything. However, know that things can go wrong with this side of RAID. Why is a bit technical, but eventually it all depends on the quality of your RAID drivers. Note that RAID drivers can cause your system to BSOD too. Generally for windows i do not recommend using RAID if you can avoid to as it might save you alot of trouble.

Also, a RAID1 is very vulnerable. Its great for uptime protection of a webserver; but in your case having a backup might be more valuable than using RAID1. Remember that RAID is NOT a backup and can never protect against the dangers a backup CAN protect against.