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RAID 2+0 and bad boot record

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by nymous 1 view

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I was working on a clients PC today and ran into something that is confusing me.

The client has a SCSI RAID 2+0 setup as a drive for video production, this along side an IDE harddrive for the operating system. The problem isn't instantly noticeable as the operating system still sees the drives (as does the scsi interface) and I still have access to all the files on the drive.

The problem is that when accessing the drive from Adobe Premier it will freeze up occasionally, while running defrag it freezes at 10% usually, and while I was running scandisk at a certain point it always returns a blue screen mentioning the VFAT. (sorry, didn't write the exact message down)

The customer has Norton's Disk Doctor installed and when running it he gets an error that mentions that the Boot Record cannot be found. When running scandisk from dos it doesn't find any issues, after running fdisk /mbr I still get the problem.

I'm a bit confused as to what a 2+0 is compared to just a 2 or a 0, but I'm also more concerned that this will require a repartitioning of the hard drives (which isn't out of the question, just seems unneccesary). I'd really appreciate any help. Thanks.

3 replies

by rcom

If the data is critcal try to ghost/copy the drive first. In cases where there's possible problems with the boot strap the worse thing to do is run disk utils like scandisk.

by nymous

All of the data has been backup up already, it's just a matter of getting the drives to work. After a little more troubleshooting today I found that when running a surface scan (in windows or dos) the utility always got stuck on a certain part of the drive, while the actual drive itself made a sort of "whirring" and "pinging" noise...so, it's just a bad drive. The only thing I'm still confused about is the VCACHE and VFAT errors...coupled with a VMM error I received today. I've tried many things short of reinstalling the OS, including running Memtest to check the RAM. Thanks for the answer though, but I had already backed everything up.

by wlbowers

As I am reading this you are talking about the SCSI raid.

You have a drive going bad in the raid. You need to break the raid down and diagnose the drives on their own. Formating might clear it up but you might have to replace one of the drives.
Once this has been takes care of reestablish the raid and test the assembly. You should have software that came with the raid card.

A scsi raid is seen as a single drive but has to be tested with utilities that understand the multi drive structure. In this understanding Norton's never will find a boot record.

Provide us with more information. Who made it and the model number. Number of drives in system.

Also I question the use of Raid 2. Raid 2 is disk striping with a percentage set aside as a check disk. Raid 2 is for disk that do not support error detection. All SCSI drives support error detection

Unless the +0 is a variation. I have not heard of it.

With some more information we can give you some more suggestions.

Good Luck Lee

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