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striped raid

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by brucc

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Im Running striped Raid using 2 60 gb WD Hard drives on a asus p4pe motherboard. the raid is built into the asus motherboard and the drives are hooked up using Serial ATA. this is running on a 2.4ghz p4 with 512 megs ram using windows Xp Home. when cold starting, the system will not recognize the raid array. using restart the system recognizes the array fine. as long as i only restart the system it works fine. but when i shutdown and cold start it will not find the array till i do a restart. any suggestions. i Have contacted asus cutomer support and was unable to get an answer.

8 replies

by wcp

This is most likely a hardware issue (RAM, M/B, or CPU).

Try the following steps. At each action, you need to cold start the computer to find whether the problem gets resolved.

1. Do BIOS flash if the M/B does not have 1002 or later version.
2. Reseat the RAM(s).
3. If you have only one RAM, put it in different slot(s).
4. If you have more than one RAM, take them out and insert one at a time.
5. You must have known good replacement of RAM, CPU, and M/B. If you do not, take your computer to a specialist for troubleshooting.
6. Replace the RAM(s) with a known good RAM.
7. If this does not resolve your problem, keep the RAM and replace the CPU and CPU fan.
8. If this does not resolve your problem, keep the CPU and the fan and replace the M/B.
9. If this does not resolve your problem, take your computer to a specialist.
10. You may consider Installing Windows on a spare HD (if you have one) before getting an outside help.

If the above steps do not resolve your problem, replace the whole system or keep the current system and just restart to get the array working.

by wcp

Step 10 is to check whether the current Windows itself is causing the problem. Sometimes, installing Windows fresh makes the problem disappear.

by jerry

It sounds like your RAID drives dont have enough time to completely spin up from a cold boot. if you slow your boot process with a memmory check or disable fast boot you will probably allow enough time for your drives to spin up and resolve your problem.

by kwduke

This sounds like the XP Prefetch Component is counteractive to your setup...

XP was designed to have improved boot and logon performance with a prefetch command that would not "access' everything at once during startup , but would later on prefetch these files in parallel with other boot operations

However, you are experiencing one of the downsides to this...the system is not "fetching" the array until you "restart" or resume... that is why it works upon restart and not from a cold boot..

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 307498
How to Disable the Prefetcher Component in Windows XP

To disable the Prefetcher component, use Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) to locate the EnablePrefetcher value under the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Change the value of the EnablePrefetcher value to 0, and then quit Registry Editor. The next time you start your computer, the Prefetcher component will not start.

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