Raid 0 BSOD's

[aman501]

I have 2 250GB sata HDD's in raid 0. when playing games (oblivion, and crysis more recently) I will randomly get a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR BSOD. Some of them say ftdisk.sys, and others say ACPI.sys. I have run memtest86 overnight twice, with no errors, and run the check disk utility with no errors. After the BSOD's everything always boots up regularly. I'm on 32-bit Windows XP. I have updated mobo BIOS, drivers, and video card drivers. Any help is appreciated! I think this is a hard drive problem so I put it here.

 

[Nodsu]

You can attach the hard drives to a non-RAID controller and test them with the manufacturer-provided diagnostics utility.

The fakeraid controllers embedded in motherboards are usually crap. If you have a Silicon Image RAID chip there, then you could just go and shoot yourself right now

 

[aman501]

would you just unplug each of them and plug them into another computer and run the utility?

I'm assuming If I were to get a raid PCI card and plugged my hard drives in it I would lose all my stuff; that the data doesn't transfer since they use different controllers/hardware/firmware/drivers.

 

[Nodsu]

Yes, you can test the drives in another machine. Just be sure that you put the drives back in the original SATA positions and don't turn on the computer when any of the drives are missing.

Fakeraid metadata is usually incompatible, even between dfferent controllers from the same manufacturer. So yes, migrating to a different controller would require a third non-RAID drive and some heav cloning/copying action

 

[aman501]

I think I'm just going to break the array and test them. I'm kind of worried I'll mess up everything if I wait until one fails. I'm thinking dual boot xp/ubuntu... Then I can wipe either the xp or ubuntu HDD and install Vista after SP1 is released, and keep all my stuff on the other HDD.

Question: If I did do the dual boot thing, with one OS on one HDD and one on the other, could I still exchange data b/t them? I.E. could each OS see the HDD with the other OS installed on it? Would it be better If I made 2 partitions on one disk for each operating system, and had data/applications/games on the other one?