RAID1 Mirror Rebuild after Data Error Running Window 7 Dim 8400

If you wish to rebuild manually, you will likely need to download a version of IRST from Intel.  The Application Accelerator may not support Windows 7, especially if you are using the 64 bit version.

You may be ok in any case.  Since you already have a RAID 1 configured, you should be able to replace the failed drive with a new, blank, drive, and allow the on-board RAID ROM to rebuild the RAID automatically.

Hi Jack,

From all the tests I have run on the hard drives (C), it does not have a problem.  The problem is 1 block of Mirror Data that is corrupted.  

What I would like to do the just "reload form the base 0 drive" to the mirror which I ASSUME would overlay the corrupted data allowing me to rerun the Dell Drive test thus removing the post of "degraded"  system.

I did have the Intel accelerator under win XP, but no source code to have Win 7 load it.

Help appreciated.

Elliott

I am not familiar with the terminology you are using; my XPS 410 running Windows XP uses Matrix Storage Manager 7.5 and has the following capability in the Actions menu:  Create RAID Volume, Create RAID from Existing Hard Drive, and Scan for Plug and Play Devices.  My RAID Option ROM will Create a RAID, Delete a RAID, Reset Drives to Non-RAID, and Exit.  There does not seem to be an option to re-synch a drive that has developed a problem, though the option ROM will normally rebuild a RAID automatically should it detect a problem.  If your computer is not detecting the corruption error you describe, the only way I know to reconstruct the array is to install a blank hard drive.  The RAID ROM should detect that and rebuild the array from the working hard drive.

You can use the drive with the corruption error for this purpose if you can find a way to reinitialize it.  The rebuild function needs either a blank drive or a detectable error for the rebuild feature to work.  From what I can tell looking at the version of the console I have, you would need to use the "Create RAID from Existing Hard Drive" feature, but I don't know if starting from a drive that is already RAID configured would cause a problem.

You should be able to install some version of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager if you are using Windows 7 32 bit.  I would think you should be able to find such a version on the Intel web site.  If you want to try the Application Accelerator that originally shipped with the Dimension 8400, you can find it on the Downloads and Drivers page for your computer.  Dimension 8400 Intel Application Accelerator.  If it complains about the version of Windows, try setting the compatibility to Windows XP.  Later versions of this application can be found at www.intel.com.  You may not be able to use the latest version of IRST due to the age of the Dimension 8400 chipset, but it should not hurt to try.  The installer will check for compatibility before attempting to perform the installation.  If it doesn't find compatible hardware, you will get an error message and the install program will exit.

Once you have a working version of Matrix Storage Manager or IRST, you will need to either delete the array or reset the drives to non-RAID.  On a RAID 1 that should result in two identical drives that would be bootable if there were no errors on the drives.  Boot the good drive, install the Application Accelerator/Matrix Storage Manager, use the Disk Management application to initialize the disk having the error, and use the "Create RAID from Existing Drive" option to rebuild the RAID.

Now that we've gone through all of this, I would suggest that you not use RAID at all on a work computer.  The commercial RAID servers using eight or more drives are good for such an application, but the Dell consumer computers typically only support RAID 0 and/or RAID 1.  It is good to play with, but relying on it can get you in trouble.  If you want to keep the Dimension 8400 I would suggest sticking with a single hard drive and establish a back-up plan using something like Acronis True Image.  Such a program can clone a drive so that you would have a spare if something happened, and also make back-up images of your data so that you don't lose too much if a catastrophe does occur.