kt7-raid and Verifying DMI pool hang

[Dag]

Ref: my post dated 27-10-2003. Summary, updated status and new question.

Help!

My home computer for the past 2 years is malfunctioning! It is a kt7-raid non-tweaked setup running raid0 with two identical Fujitsu disks. The only HW-"near" change I have done in the past year is usage of external USB-disk and USB-printer.

I believe the BIOS is reporting a UL version.

Symptoms:
RAM gets counted OK (512)
BIOS seems OK
...

In an attempt to refind my system, I reordered the boot sequence to floppy, CD and RAID100. If no floppy or CDs are in their respecitve slots, the system will now hang after:
Verifying DMI Pool....
<something ATAPI (cddrive)>
<something ATAPI (cddrive)>

(yes, I have two CD-drives installed...)
Then the harddisk light flashes on and off, the two disks hum, but otherwise no other actions are observed.

If I put in a windows 2000 install/boot disk, the windows installer program will start, show all the drivers it is loading and then report that no disks (mass storage device) to be found.

As to the lead on possible defect capacitors, I have not been able to see any leaks, but I could still be wrong...

Does this mean my disks are dead? If they are not, but I am still not able to get my system up, could I install these disks in a new RAID0 system and not lose my data?

Thanks for the responses so far. All suggestions are very welcome!

Dag

 

[GlassVial]

If your BIOS is a revision UL, then you must have an *extremely* old bios. Here's the last 4 revisions on Abit's website:

A9 (current)
7N
64
4A

I would strongly suggest updating your BIOS as a first step.

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 08:37:37 +0100, Dag wrote:

Ref: my post dated 27-10-2003. Summary, updated status and new question. Help!

My home computer for the past 2 years is malfunctioning!
It is a kt7-raid non-tweaked setup running raid0 with two identical Fujitsu disks. The only HW-"near" change I have done in the past year is usage of external USB-disk and USB-printer.

I believe the BIOS is reporting a UL version.

Symptoms:
RAM gets counted OK (512)
...

-GV

 

[Dag]

On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 18:02:53 GMT, GlassVial wrote:

If your BIOS is a revision UL, then you must have an *extremely* old bios. Here's the last 4 revisions on Abit's website:

A9 (current)
7N
64
4A

I would strongly suggest updating your BIOS as a first step.

Yes, I realize that I have an old BIOS, but the BIOS should not go out on date on a functioning system, i.e. an old BIOS should not stop working without an outer change! Or am I wrong?

I will try out renewing the BIOS, but doubt it will help my case. Thanks for the reminder!

Dag

<....>

In an attempt to refind my system, I reordered the boot sequence to floppy, CD and RAID100. If no floppy or CDs are in their respecitve slots, the
system will now hang after:
Verifying DMI Pool....
<something ATAPI (cddrive)>
<something ATAPI (cddrive)>

(yes, I have two CD-drives installed...)
Then the harddisk light flashes on and off, the two disks hum, but
otherwise no other actions are observed.

...

 

[GlassVial]

I would strongly suggest updating your BIOS as a first step.

Yes, I realize that I have an old BIOS, but the BIOS should not go out on date on a functioning system, i.e. an old BIOS should not stop working without an outer change! Or am I wrong?

I will try out renewing the BIOS, but doubt it will help my case. Thanks for the reminder!

Dag

I hate to say it, but I don't buy into the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" line about BIOS updating the mobo mfr's give you. More often than not there *IS* something broken that you may not know about, big examples would include breaking the 137GB barrier (which some Mfr's did, and some did NOT - ie Asus! I will never buy another Asus board because of their laziness to not release a bios update for a board that could have very easily supported 137+GB drives) </rant> another biggie is XP/2000 support, support for newer/additional CPU's, and so on (I'm sure others could throw out plenty of examples here). I just updated the bios on a system I'm working on here (Gigabyte) found out it was running a beta bios (!!) no wonder I was having problems. After flashing with the latest (last) bios for the board, and changing some other settings, the machine finally started behaving as it should and is not rock solid (knock on wood)

However in your case, it *is* broken and it does need fixing A BIOS upgrade would be the first thing I do in your case, with the problems you are having. After that, if it's still not working then moving down the line of troubleshooting is next.

-GV

 

[Dag]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 16:44:32 GMT, Brian Brunner wrote:

On Thu, 06 Nov 2003 16:34:50 GMT, GlassVial
wrote:

I would strongly suggest updating your BIOS as a first step.

I would not.

Your system worked, and stopped working. That, not a moldy BIOS is a problem.

Thanks, I have been working up courage to flash BIOS and CMOS, still wondering why BIOS should suddenly go faulty. The only change I could think of that could have provoked my system is Daylight savings time

You said the boot/install CDs don't detect any mass storage devices... 1: check cables

Can a cable fault suddenly appear too?

A little correction, the system do not hang at dmi pool..., it hangs after. I reordered the system boot sequence to go from diskette, harddrive to diskette, CDx2, harddrive. The system will display the "dmi pool..." stuff before complaining if one of the two CD-drives contains a non-boot-disk. Also, if I am not mistaken, the diskettestation and/or my CDdrives are on the same cable as the harddisks...

You said you hang at DMI pool verification... that's after the BIOS probes the RAID array. You can therefore get into the RAID bios and see if the drives are detected there.

Highly unlikely that both drives fail together, more likely that the RAID chip went out, or that dust simulates such loss.

If the RAID BIOS sees one drive, sounds like you're in need of a replacement drive and your backup images... you have some... yes?

As a typical home-pc owner I am missing some backup...

OK, Given new cables do not fix the system and my main concern is some of the data on the two drives (RAID0, striping...)
- If ctrl-h (Highpoint/RAID) show just one disk, my next choice is to consider ibas, or some other disksaving company.
- If both disks are visible, how do I verify if it is the RAID-chip or caps or some other cause? Can I put my two disks in another/new RAID-motherboard and expect to be able to find my data again?

Thanks for your thoughts!
Dag

 

[Dag]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 00:33:11 GMT, Brian Brunner wrote:

Also, if I am not mistaken, the diskettestation and/or my CDdrives are on
the same cable as the harddisks...

!!!

The RAID chip on my ABIT KT7-RAID does NOT like CDRom drives. Universal advice is to put the ATAPI devices (CDROM) onto bus IDE0/1 , and *just*
*harddrives* on the RAID chip cables (suggest 1 drive as master on each bus).

If your hard drives and your floppy drives are on the same cables, I'll ...

You are again correct. I thought the rat's nest (mess of IDE-cables) included cables that touched both a disk and a cdrom. They didn't.

To ease the hunt for why my system crashes, I took out all the internal flat cables and put only two cables back. One from IDE3 on the mainboard(RAID setup) with a harddisk set as master hanging on in the middle, the slave connection was not attached to anything. Likewise I did the same from IDE4, disk set up as master hanging on middle connection.

Ctrl-H (BIOS/RAID) setup recognize both my FUJITSU MPF3204AH disks, in the status section, HDD0 is set as primary master and HDD1 is set as secondary master, both mode UDMA4.

Continuing booting, the system still freezes after "verifying dmi pool data".

If I change the boot disk, either by switching cables or by using the Ctrl-H menus I get the message: "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

I can't remember if I ever touched the mode field in the ctrl-h menus, is UDMA4 ok? Also, the Array Status page shows nothing. Should there be something there? May this mean that I may have lost the RAID Array?

Thanks for all help so far!
Dag