Gigabyte with RAID 5 crashed

[-X-hellfire]

I have read about your experience with SSD, raid 5 and Murphys Law as I´m a longtime XS reader, I don´t write very much though, but you made it come back to life, thanks

The weird thing is that had 2-3 day before this raid 5 crash happened I had upgraded my nforce drivers for PhysX support and had tested it in a few applications, gamedemos, screensavers etc that had support for it, downloaded all these from nvidia and selected about 4 GB from the 4.6 GB Graphic Plus Power Packs

...some screensavers worked great and some games but some other didn't nothing out of the ordinary but one application, Crazy Machines II PhysXFluids (CM2), had you to enter your name before actually start using it´s PhysX effects etc but the mouse cursor to it was gone and the only way to get out of the program was to press the power button on the computer for 4 seconds restarted computer tried again, same thing, uninstalled it, then tried a later revision of it but exactly the the same result

...but this time the desktops icons in the taskbar had changed size, not a good sign, but it was easy to change back and then I tried Firefox etc it all looked like it worked but when I started Winamp the computer froze only the mouse moved, did the 4-second restart thing again and thought it was something with winamp and deleted its local settings/temp/folder and tried it but i froze but this time when windows xp had started the Intel Storage Matrix Manager ran a Verification and Repair on d: the raid 5 volume, this took 3 hours

it found nothing wrong and did nothing, didn't report that any of the 3 harddisks had failed or anything, tried to see log reports of any evidence of some errors etc but found nothing

computer restarted and looked like it worked anduninstalled CM2 and ran antivirus & antispyware but it found nothing

Then tried Media Player Classic (MPC) and it worked great playing up music and videos then I tried Winamp again and it froze but this time after the 4 sec powerbutton thing it just shows the



and the freezes, you cant even get into the raid bios or the motherboard bios, execpt if you disconnect the raid harddisks but them you wont see anything concering them anyway but did a BIOS default reload and have tried many things but all failed

Bought one of four 1TB SATA harddisk just to see if the motherboard was ok or not but got a BSOD when installing windows XP, this was in March so I dont remember every step that I did, but I know from the past that at some point you press F6 to enter the Raid-drivers,

well, its too late now 4am, will think about buying the
Disk Jockey Pro IT - Hard Drive Duplicator with SATA (DJ), or sending the computer to some computerexperts or something but its probably more expensive than the $500 DJ



How can two drives or more fail at the same time?


It annoys me a bit that the RMA guy didn't put in a SATA harddisk to make sure the SATA controller is ok or not, now I don't now, and it might be a bad idea if the SATA-controller is bad and it scrambles the raid 5 drives even more, well idk, will try again and see if I can find some used parts on the internet as I always buy new stuff




I searched some webshops around here but they didn´t have the 7200.10 any longer as that was may plan to put in other one