Drive arrangement

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 11th, 2010, 22:42

Right, my machine is acting weird, and explorer is crashing a lot.

I have a sneaky feeling this is due to my OS drives being on my not super fast raid controller, in RAID 0.

Anyway, I need to fix it.

My options as I can see them are:

Plain Drives on mobo, 1 for windows, 1 for apps; Not as fast as RAID, no boot issues, should be dead stable.

RAID 0 on mobo; has boot issues, but get-around-able, very fast.

RAID 0 on controller; Pretty fast, not very stable.

Plain Drives on raid controller; No good reason to do this.

Note: these are all with 2x1TB Samsung F3s, also available are 2x150GB raptor and 1x500GB WD RE drive, so I'm open to other cunning ideas.

What should I do?

Post by **HereComesPete** » January 11th, 2010, 23:08

I've never been too bothered about raid, right now my pc takes about ten seconds to turn on, warm up and be ready to log in. And that's if I turn it on/off as opposed to just put it in sleep mode. As for OS raiding I've always got hassle from it despite the speed increase.

Stability is a major piss boiler for me, if it takes longer but doesn't break I'll take that any day of the week.

But the crashing, have you noticed any patterns in it?

Tried a repair/reinstall of windaz to see if there's a random spazzy file?

Does it give an errorz or is it one of those ones where the taskbar just buggers off and you need to restart explorer?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 11th, 2010, 23:15

HereComesPete wrote:But the crashing, have you noticed any patterns in it?

Yep, randomly when I try to access

My computer
C:\Downloads
C:\Users\Berk\Documents

or any other file-heavy folders, seems like a drive spinup crash, but on always on/running drives.

Not much obvious in the event logs.

Post by **HereComesPete** » January 11th, 2010, 23:32

Hmm. Hmmm.

Could it be a random file with wrong extension? A few too many mass moved files? A codec problem for what I'm guessing is a lot of films?

I take it from the lack of event logging it's just a momentary spaz? Or do you need to start task manager to restart explorer yourself? Anything innocuous like module faults but in system 32 modules?

Maybe a CCleaner run?

Probably you've tried these but I figure I'll throw as many random ideas down as I can.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 11th, 2010, 23:35

It's too spread out to be anything like that, and oddly, it happens less on my raid 5 arrays, which are pretty much pure files.

it's an explorer.exe has shat the bed and wants to restart itself error.

I've not tried any deep fettling at all yet, as I'm getting the impression it's a deeper problem than just a fucked file.

buzzmong · Post by **buzzmong** » January 11th, 2010, 23:47

Is it possible that one of the hdd's has an error in its file table?

I don't dabble with raid despite planning to, so I don't know if it's possible to get it to verify individual file tables, although I suspect that depends on Raid type.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 11th, 2010, 23:54

Raid acts as 1 drive as far as windows is concerned, and the issues aren't replicable easily, it's a pretty random thing.

buzzmong · Post by **buzzmong** » January 12th, 2010, 0:04

It could be driver related for explorer to keep sharting itself, I wouldn't have thought so apart from the fact you say it still happens, although infrequently, on your Raid 5 arrays.

Tried updating the Raid drivers?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 12th, 2010, 0:12

All drivers are up to date, and same as I've been using forever.

Also, another symptom is flash videos (like iplayer) stuttering rather for no good reason.

Never had either of these issues before, and never ran my OS drives on my raid controller before, so I'm thinking they're related.

Post by **FatherJack** » January 12th, 2010, 6:17

Could a drive be on the way out? Maybe one where the swap file, index or media library is. I've abandoned RAID0 for anything except swap space or temporary storage where it can be trashed and rebuilt without having to restore backups as I've had poor luck with it breaking drives.

I had something similar not long ago, moved everything around to other drives, formatted the original ones and put everything back and it's been okay since.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 12th, 2010, 6:23

It's pretty unlikely a drive is ill I think, as the F3s are both pretty new, and seem to be the root cause, nothing tends to go wrong on other drives.

Though that may just be because the F3s are most used, and the explorer crash doesn't usually repeat itself.

Lateralus · Post by **Lateralus** » January 12th, 2010, 7:56

How're your jam supplies?

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » January 12th, 2010, 10:21

I'm goint to lay out the bleeding obvious, although it is the long way around the block. You currently don't know what the problem is, so go back to basics.

i) Acronis/Ghost your existing system partition.
ii) Quick and dirty reinstall of your system partition with all same drivers & equipment as you currently have (DriverBackup - http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/ or DriverMax - http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/ can help you with this. Does the problem replicate?
iii) If your 2x raptor drives are big enough for your system partition (don't worry about other partions for now) , create a RAID 0 partiton on your not super fast raid controller. Blow the current system image back on. Does the problem replicate?

If you can perform ii) & iii) you're going to narrow your problem down a bit and then diagnose, fix or nuke from orbit further. There are more steps after this, but you know the idea and it'll get you started.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 12th, 2010, 17:18

That sounds remarkably sensible, though my massive lumbering install won't fit on any of my other drives.

I'll try paring it down a bit.

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » January 12th, 2010, 18:32

Realised I haven't tried the driverbackup tools on Windows 7 yet, so use at own risk,YMMV and don't blame me if it eats your bacon in the fridge.

Good luck!

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 12th, 2010, 18:47

cheeseandham wrote:Realised I haven't tried the driverbackup tools on Windows 7 yet, so use at own risk,YMMV and don't blame me if it eats your bacon in the fridge.

Good luck!

Fortunately, you're still ahead one bacon butty, so you might get to live

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » January 17th, 2010, 22:20

Any joy?

I've managed to fettle my Latitude XT with Windows 7 - it's taking a while to find the right voodoo of drivers to get the thing working. Tempted to go back to Fista. It's putting me off upgrading my XPS too.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 17th, 2010, 23:07

Oddly, it's been behaving since i cleaned my desktop up.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 21st, 2010, 7:56

... And the crash came back, along with event viewer failing, complains of borked MMC snap in, then crashes.

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » January 21st, 2010, 20:15

WinAudit - http://winaudit.zymichost.com/index.html

Will show you the event logs in a basic form.