(no subject)

[elizilla]

Great. I just got the new monitor, and now my computer has broken down. Grrr. Yes, I have other computers, but the one that broke is the one I use all the time, so this is inconvenient.

Putting the details here so I can refer back to them as needed while I troubleshoot this.



When I try to boot it, it goes to the BIOS screen and says:

RAID BIOS Version 2.5.1540.31_1
(c) 2006 ATI Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
Scanning drives ......................................................
........................................
Warning - Something wrong with your hardware!.


and there it sits.

Googling for this, I find some people talking about getting this error from new systems, and fussing about compatibilities with motherboards and raid controllers and whatnot. This is not a new system - I've had it almost two years, so I wouldn't think is was a hardware compatibility issue. I got the new monitor last week, but other than that nothing's changed in ages. One person says they found that one of their hard drives in their raid array had gone bad. Wouldn't surprise me - hard drives go bad, that's why I got the raid in this system. I guess the next thing to do is to open it and disconnect one drive at a time and see if it will boot. I guess if that works, I'll be trying to find a new hard drive to put in it, to replace the dead one. Raid is supposed to recover easily from sudden hard drive death syndrome, that's the whole point, but I never have done that before. I hope it's not too hard to make it kick in and do its thing. And I hope it's forgiving if the new hard drive doesn't match perfectly - I'm guessing the hard drives in it now are smaller than anything commonly available now.

Comments

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

In my limited experience with RAID, if a member drive fails, the computer boots fine then throws an error, assuming you have a flavor of RAID with redundancy.

If your RAID controller is a separate piece of hardware, I'd suspect it.

Oh, and IME, you can always add a larger drive to an array--but it'll be formated down to the smaller capacity.

Now, if you ran Linux with Logical Volume Manager.... (Sorry, had to.)

[elizilla]

I do have a flavor of raid with redundancy. There are two 300GB hard drives, so I have 300GB of space and one backs the other up.

If the raid controller is bad, I wonder if I can just bypass it and boot from one of the two hard drives, and pretend it's a machine without raid? I suppose I could try to get another controller, but I didn't build he PC myself, and I don't know if the controller is independent of the motherboard, or if they are together. And I don't know how replaceable it is, whether a different raid controller would be able to pick up where this one left off.

I guess I will just have to open it. But first, I need to clear space in my office, so I can bring it up from the basement. Right now, my monitor and keyboard and mouse cables go through a hole in the floor to a KVM switch mounted under the office floor, on the basement ceiling, and from there I have three computers on a rack with all the cables all neatly routed. It's pretty spiffy and I'm going to have to mess it all up to rip this machine out, sigh.

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

That's the price you pay for having the coolest 'puter set-up. Life is hard at the top. :)

300GB-ish hard-drives are still quite common, so you shouldn't have a problem replacing a hard-drive. The controller may be more problematic. You are aware of NewEgg?

[elizilla]

That is where I got the new monitor, so yes. (Can't remember what I last ordered from them, but they had me in their system so I must have ordered something at some point in the past, too.)

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

Oh, and there should be some magic key you can hit during POST that will take you into the "RAID Utility". Can you get to that before the error locks everything? Cntrl-I or somesuch.

[elizilla]

Can't find it, but I was able to bypass it by disconnecting the bad drive, and come up on the remaining drive. I think I may be out of the woods now.