SATA Raid and XP and Server 2003

[Essbee]

About 2 months ago i bought 2 identical Hitachi 160Gb SATA drives and a PCI add-on controller card (as the motherboard in this PC doesn't support SATA natively). This PC was running server 2003 and i installed ASPI 4.60 and configured the 2 drives as RAID 0 using the controller card BIOS option during POST. Everything was running fine until i trashed the Server OS installation (which was on a seperate disk) and installed XP Pro. Not one week after this, the RAID array started showing data integrity errors. Repeated chkdsk attempts didnt resolve the problem.

I have now installed APSI 4.60 in the XP OS installation, but it doesn't make a difference - chkdsk still reports errors. I have run IBMs/Hitachis Drive Fitness Test and it reports no problmes with either disk.

The starnge thing is, each time i now run chkdsk, different files are reported as having bad clusters.

Is the problem not having the the 'correct' APSI drivers installed from the beginning and has now corrupted data or with the new OS the issue or have i a faulty disk or controller card? The retailer of the components (i bought them from the same place at the same time) said they knew of no issues with the controller card.

My biggest problem (easily fixed except i cant afford it) is to buy another disk big enough to copy all the data from the arry onto, and then run the two original disks as stand alones to see if the problem re-appears on either.

A bit involved, but i hope you can follow. Any thoughts welcome.

Cheers

Steve

 

[satrow]

This may be the result of flakey RAM or a PSU that doesn't cut it with the extra load.

Andy.

 

[Essbee]

Ram i'm not sure about as this PC has had the same hardware config for 2 years now, and i have had no problems with anything. PSU i could agree with, but it seems coincidental that the errors cropped up with the change in OS. The only change from having no problems to having problems is the OS change - no hardware of any kind took place.

BTW, thanks for a quick reponse -less than 3 minutes from my original post....is that some kind of record????

And for the record, i'm not really that bothered about having RAID esp with SATA drives - it's just annoying to have a problem and not know what caused it........