Problem with 8knxp Gigaraid

I have been experiencing a problem with the ITE raid portion of my
8knxp for awhile now but it becomes untenable when I begin to run World
of warcraft. I have 2 identical 80gb hard drives striped on the array
as the hardware details will show. When I run World of warcraft the
raid begins shutting down and restarting the drives simultaneously. As
soon as I shut off world of warcraft all is well.

I have the 2 western digitals set to master. One on ide3 and one on ide
4. Nothing else is on that chain.

My boot drive is an 80gb hitachi on ide1, dvd-rom as slave on ide1
cd-rw on ide2, ls-120 as slave on ide2

I have 1 serial ata hard drive on sata0


It has passed a strenuous test with burnin test as well. I have gone
over a month recently without rebooting. Until I started having this
issue.

I get these three notices in my event viewer that coincide with the
raid problem.

1. ERROR The device, \Device\Scsi\iteraid1, did not respond within the
timeout period. (likely due to the drives shutting down and restarting)

2. WARNING An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a
paging operation. (likely due to the drives shutting down and
restarting)

3. WARNING The driver has detected that device \Device\Scsi\iteraid1
has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result. (I
have the bios the board came with. The ITE sight has many revisions
newer for their standalone cards which I know won't work for this
board.)

So I have searched the gigabyte website for the updated firmware and
flash program suited specifically to this on-board card but I have only
found drivers, with which I updated to the most recent ones and the
problem still exists.

I have seen one post mentioning that someone did succeed in getting the
1.7 version of the bios from Gigabyte but so far they have given me no
real help. Just telling me to make sure the drives are set as master on
ide3 and ide4 (which they are and always have been)

I suspect the board doesn't handle having both serial and IDE drives
active at the same time. I have also tried making the 2 drives seperate
and turned off the IDE raid function but this did not fix the issue.

The only thing I have been able to do at this point is unplug those 2
drives and not use them, leaving my boot drive and my serial ata drive
in place.

Does anyone know where I can get the correct bios update or other
possibilities this might be?

 

Regarding point 3, your driver seems to be ahead of your BIOS, so perhaps
you need to downgrade the driver version?

 

More like GB should get off their bums and into action and update the bios's
for the mobos that are now well behind.

 

Yes, agreed. But the OP is looking for a quick fix based on what is
available, I guess.

 

It started with the original driver version. I updated AFTER the issue
began.

 

Correct. I am trying everything that is available to me to come to a
solution and the next step is for a [email protected][email protected]@ way overdue bios update for
the ITE GigaRAID. If the issue continues after that I just might have 2
80gb Wd's to sell on ebay in favor of a second SATA Maxtor identical to
the one I already have. I love the 16mb cache buffer on it.

 

Oh dear! Sorry

 

Firstly, I think it is paramount to find out why the drives were spinning
down. Was it the power connectors? If so, then fine - fix it , if not then I
would not use the same config until such time as the cause was found. If the
issue is occuring only during game play then it could be PSU overloading or
some over temp situation. Use one of the MBM like tools to monitor temps and
volts during a Test.

IMHO, disc drives will not power down unless either they are told to, or
there is a big voltage problem. I am of the opinion that the spinning down
of the drives is not due to bios / firmware or driver issues, but the
problem lies elsewhere. How much juice does you graphics card consumer? Are
its drivers up to date? How hot do the drives get?

In your case, if disc drives had been falling off line - spinning down, I
would have panicked at that point. A raid 1 config can't afford for issues
on both images at the same time - it has no way of reconciling what is right
on one disc with what is right on another. One will fail first, the other
may already be corrupt in such a situation.

Although it is well known that the GB bios / ITE firmware is out of date,
what is not known / well known is how good the actual ITE raid
implementation is. It seems as though the ITE raid is rarely used - SATA
raid seems much more common and those that want IDE raid often have
controllers already. So, this could be a red herring. The changes in the
latest firmware could be as trivial as spelling mistakes for all we know.
Since the cause in your case is the drive powering down you are right in
suspecting everything, but it may be absolutely nothing to do with the ITE
firmware or driver. (A game should not ever be able to affect a disc
controller or driver - if you have a wonky graphics card or a wonky driver
on the graphics card this *can* happen).

Due to GB's inability to maintian the bios adequately, I would not use the
ITE controller for any raid. I suggest getting something that is better
supported and has a good reputation EG a Promise controller and rebuild on
that.

- Tim

 

The drives spin down simultaneously which leads me to believe it IS a
bios issue. If it were a power issue then only one drive would kick off
or they wouldn't kick off in synch and kick on in synch. Not to mention
the event viewer log gives a clear message about out of date bios. If
it was a 3d graphics and power related issue, then the problem would
have occured on half-life 2 which has higher specs than WOW.

The raid is removed and for now the drives are not even plugged in.
That was done after the initial diagnosis. No data is going to be lost.
The power supply is a enermax 400 watt. It is not a generic PS.

I do not need to stick another card in my machine for these drives.
Should it become clear that I am not going to see a bios update, then I
will simply sell off the 80gb drives and get a second SATA Maxtor.

The issue had happened without the game. Just very rarely and not to
such an extreme extent. I like your idea on the graphics driver though.
I will give that a test.

 

Well, those are quite helpful observations that blow things out of the
water.
Bad news for ITE... never trusted it to start with.

 

Hi,

As an aside, I ran a RAID0 array with two WD 40GB hard drives off the
ITE 8212f controller on my rev. 1 8knxp for almost a year. It ran quite
stably -- albeit, under Linux.

Eventually, I switched to just a plain (non-RAID, master/slave)
configuration after extensive frustration with the 8212f driver code
under the 2.6 kernel. (At the time, Alan Cox hadn't begun his work on
the ITE driver, so I was spending too much time manually patching the
kernel with ITE's buggy code.)

At any rate ... My point is that it sounds to me like a buggy driver,
not necessarily a BIOS issue. Yes, the BIOS on our Gigabyte mobos is
"antiquated", but I think that there's more to it than simply a "bad
BIOS" -- e.g., it seems odd to me that it happens when you start up a
game, and not as frequently at other times. It also seems odd that I
could run a stable Linux system for so long without seeing my drives
power down mysteriously.


Kris

 

I ran a raid 0 for over a year with these 2 80gb Wd's and had no
issue..Then I installed the SATA drive. The issue started, rarely, but
it started. The issue has remained consistent with that game regardless
of the driver version.

Like I said in an earlier post, I believe it is a conflict between the
SATA and ITE chipsets that requires a bios update to resolve.

Still waiting on gigabyte.

 

I ran a raid 0 for over a year with these 2 80gb Wd's and had no

I'm highly sceptical ...


1) Moreover, I've owned a similar system (with two PATA drives off the
ITE8212f, and one SATA drive), and haven't witnessed any problems. The
fact that I run Linux would seem to suggest that it might be your
Windows drivers.

2) Take a look at the change log for the most recent IT8212f chip. Most
of the changes have been to address issues in the user interface or in
chipsets/BIOSs other than what is on our 8KNXP....


====================================
1.4.1.5:

1.Return ax=110h instead of 100h when leaving BIOS initial routine.
2.Bug fixed: DMA transfer failure on certain main boards.


1.4.1.6:

1.Setup Utility can’t be displayed when working with Phoenix BIOS
2.Always boot from 8212 HDD when using Phoenix BIOS


1.5.1.7:

1.Force reconstruction restarts if data inconsistent is found.
2.Include the replacement drive into array if user press <Y> key.


1.6.1.8:

1.If BIOS fails to get rebuild status (error code 51h), show message
"Rebuilding is stopped by target drive write error or source drive read
error. Please turn off the power and replace disk. Press ANY KEY to
continue." instead of "fail to get rebuild status"
2.PCI configuration space offset 51h bit 0: 0.. Show copyright and other
info, 1.. Do not show copyright and drive info
3.Bug fixed: for Gigabyte VIA chipset MB, fail to boot from secondary
HDD.


1.7.1.92:

1.Arrays attached on IT8212 can be shown in system BIOS’s hard diskboot
priority list.
2.Add detailed error information.
3.Add single mirrored drive check. When there is only one mirrored drive
is attached on IT8212, show the following message “A disk member ofthis
array was removed and it is not functional now. Please press <Y> to set
up drive n as a IDE drive automatically or press OTHER KEY to setup
array manually later.�
4.Change setup utility delete array's key [del] to key [d].


1.7.1.93:

1. modify IRQ share issue
====================================


So, I'd be tempted to look into why the problem happens spuriously when
you start up your game ... (Is it a power issue? A memory issue? A
driver issue?) I'd only resort to hassling Gigabyte (a futile effort, I
suspect) once I'd eliminated the more likely candidates.


regards,
Kris

 

They did for me for a GA-8I875 Ultra same MoBo but with out the DPS2


The ITE would not boot with 2 drives ATA but would with 4 ..

I now have the latest ITE bios and I can select what drive that I can boot
from, I think it came up with 6 devises..



I just kept asking for a fix plus the New ITE Bios..

took about 6 weeks from memory, this bios that I have is now 6 month old and
still not on there web site.