I had the techs at my local computer shop tell me this, and I later verified it myself: Windows will eventually accumulate errors and fail when run on a bootable ( C )drive that is striped. Apparently the boot sector gets corrupted.
Obviously, this shouldn't be a "normal" occurance, as I have never heard it mentioned elsewhere (like on Tom's). It did appear to be true (for me, at least) though. I ran Win XP on a striped pair and it died within a week. I then put XP on a third drive, and the striped pair never had problems again. What could I be doing wrong, or is it inherant in the setup?
My System:

<font color=red>MSI KT4 Ultra</font color=red> - Replaced this Sunday with an A7N8x, haven't tried RAID on it yet!
AMD XP2000+
2- 512MB sticks (Twin)Corsair XMS3200LL
HighPoint RocketRAID 1540 4-channel serial ATA adapter
2x Western Digital 80GB SE (8MB cache) drives
1x IBM Deskstar 60GB Drive
ASUS GeForce4 Ti4200
3-Com network card
Sound Blaster Live! audio
Windows XP Home
Enermax Whisper 350 power supply

Help.

rebturtle.com

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by rebturtle on 04/15/03 08:46 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

The problem is that the OS (xp in your case) doesn't know about the striping until the RAID driver is loaded. If your NTDETECT and NTLDR files or any of your config files get striped, it will think they are corrupted...



--->It ain't better if it don't work<---

So is there a way around this? I loaded the RAID drivers each time I loaded Windows. One possible issue I forgot to mention was that the drivers are not approved (digitally signed) by Microsoft. The adapter has worked great for months now with the OS on a separate disk from the striped pair. Is that the way I'll have to keep it?
Thanks in advance,

<A HREF="http://rebturtle.com" target="_new">rebturtle</A>

the problem is that the drivers won't load until after NTDETECT is started... It launches the OS itself... which in turn launches the drivers... By the time it gets to the drivers, it's way too late if the NTDETECT has been striped.

I'm no RAID expert... maybe the others can offer more insight.


--->It ain't better if it don't work<---

Aha, that makes the little hampster in my head spin in the right direction. Thanks.

<A HREF="http://rebturtle.com" target="_new">rebturtle</A>

i thought sp1 was supposed to fix this problem?

(old person by trait)

Unfortunately, Sp1 makes my system unstable. Each time i've installed it, I end up getting dreaded blue screens within days or even hours. I've given up, and have hopes that Sp2 will be better.

<A HREF="http://rebturtle.com" target="_new">rebturtle</A>

Hard to say exactly what is wrong. I am running with WindowsXP Pro on a RAID0 array, I'm sure many others do also, and it works just fine. Other half of the array is used ALOT for eDonkey uploads / downloads. Pagefile.sys is on a separate RAID0+1 array.

Regarding the striping of NTDETECT.COM and Ntldr, the file sizes are 47.7Kb and 229Kb respecively. I have a 32Kb stripe size so both programs will have been striped.d That kind of negates Teq's assertion, sorry.

The key seems to lie in your problem with Windows. The fact that SP1 crashes your system tells me that there is something badly wrong. Try getting hold of the Pro edition from somewhere, maybe that will help you out.

The other problem could be your memory or memory timings, the RAID driver or the use of non-standard IDE cables.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A>