RAID errors on large copies and in event viewer

[lkjhg]

I'd posted in another part of techspot about a problem that, it finally turned out, was a slowly, very slowly, dying hard disk that I'd had as my D drive for data and documents, etc. on an XP SP3 system, 1 gig memory, Pentium 4 (3.2 GHz).

Not wanting to again be so vulnerable to losing my data, I thought I'd try a RAID configuration.

I went cheap (yes, often a mistake, I know) with an Addonics ADSA2 PCI controller card that supported software RAID.

Once I got past the bad documentation - the installation guide started with the driver installation, then the next step said "do this part first if you're configuring RAID" and described a procedure where several things were to be installed BEFORE the card was - things never really got going smoothly.

I got RAID running, and thought that for sake of ease, I'd just copy my data (roughly 150 gigs) from the single drive that had it, to the new RAID setup.

The old drive I had relettered to Q, and the new array was D (this was done before I configured RAID and formatted the new drives). So I went to Q:\ and selected all (highlighting all top-level files and folders, and their subcontents), copied, then went to D:\ and pasted.

Every time I tried this, within 2-5 minutes, I'd have a BSOD, either a kernel stack or a kernel data inpage error. The time it seemed to work best, I'd moved about 7.5 gigs in 6,500 some files.

So is that a problem with the RAID or with Windows and its copy function? Obviously, I don't typically copy that much data using copy and paste, but I've done it before without problems.

Ultimately I used an image of my data and restored that image onto D and all worked well.

And the computer has been stable now for almost 24 hours since all this happened. There've been two exceptions.

One was that twice on restart, XP has launched chkdsk on C (my boot drive, not the RAIDed data drive). The first time this happened, I'd had to do a force restart after a lockup on a mass copy attempt, so I could have accepted this becuase of the abnormal ending. The second time though was after a smooth Windows restart, that I did when installing some Windows updates (a .NET service pack, that had been pushed to me after I had to install .NET as part of the required RAID utility package that came with the controller card). Since I'm almost never asked to run chkdsk, and when I am I usually understand why, this bothers me.

The other is that I have gotten several event viewer errors related to the new RAID array. A few were at a time when I had restarted Windows (smooth and normal Windows restart), and it went to the login screen fine, and stayed that way overnight. Others have occurred invisible to me when I'm on the PC. Here's the most recent one:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: SiSRaid
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Date: 8/15/2010
Time: 12:48:50 PM
User: N/A
Computer: XP
Description:
The device, \Device\Scsi\SiSRaid1, did not respond within the timeout period.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 0f 00 10 00 01 00 68 00 ......h.
0008: 00 00 00 00 09 00 04 c0 .......À
0010: 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: a2 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 ¢.......
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0030: 00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 ........

Is this stuff normal? Should I be worried? Pre-RAID I'd go weeks usually, but often months, with no errors ever in my event viewer.

 

[DelJo63]

So I went to Q:\ and selected all (highlighting all top-level files and folders, and their subcontents), copied, then went to D:\ and pasted.

Ouch! The technique of copy/paste is more likely to cause issues than anything else, especially on large size transfers.

• Empty the Raid target
• Select the top-level-folders
• drag-n-drop onto the Raid Drive letter

 

[lkjhg]

Ouch! The technique of copy/paste is more likely to cause issues than anything else, especially on large size transfers.

Makes sense. But I looked and I don't see any credible "cite" for drag/drop working any differently from copy/paste.

I'd like to think that it was my technique that caused the problems, and not anything squirrely about the RAID configuration or controller.

If there's a reasonable online source explaining differences, I'd appreciate reading about it.

 

[DelJo63]

I'll explain this way; Recall that COPY places data into the clipboard and PASTE extracts from it.
This says all those dirs/files need to be replicated into the clipbook file.
It's a shorter path and less resource usage to just d-n-d.

When you find that article, please follow-up with it so others may benefit from your effort :wave: