RAID Problem (Promise Fasttrak100 Lite RAID 1)

We just got back from vacation, and my wife's computer is reporting a problem with the RAID 1 array on bootup. It says: "A disk member of a mirrored array has failed or is not responding." It then gives instructions saying to check the drives' connections, and how to identify the failed drive and rebuild the array.

So I try to figure out which drive is dead by disconnecting one at a time. Say my drives are D1 and D2. If D1 and D2 are connected, the FastBuild utility says it sees D1 but not D2. If I disconnect D2, it still sees D1, which is as expected.

However, if I disconnect D1 but leave D2 connected, it NOW sees D2. I can even boot off D2 without any trouble.

So it seems that the drives are fine individually but not together. So I'm thinking the drives themselves are fine, and the problem is elsewhere (possibly the mobo).

The drives are identical Seagate Barracuda 80 GB drives, each master on their own IDE channel. The mobo is a Soyo Dragon Plus (K7VXA-2BA3).

I'll probably go buy a new drive tomorrow to see if that fixes it, but I have a feeling that it won't. Anybody have any idea why this is happening?

One of the drives may have bad sectors etc. ie the data is not being mirrored properly.

If you booted of one drive and not the other then the array needs to be re-built no matter what.

I would use the seagate seatool bootdisk and test the drives for bad sectors etc. (Long test)

If all checks out rebuild the array. I also found that the hardware based rebuilds on FastTrack controllers are not allways successful. So if that fails just use the Windows FastTrack Utility.

Ok, thanks, I'm running the seatools tests now.

Turned out the HSF was pretty clogged up with dust and the CPU was running very hot. (The comp crashed a couple times doing the seatools surface scans from overheating.) Fixed that, did the scans (no problems). I still couldn't rebuild the array; I had to delete it first and then re-create it. After doing that, everything now works fine.