Both SATA drives fail diagnostics in 'RAID On' setting

Question

My XPS 410 was shipped with one HD and a BIOS setting of 'RAID On'. I added a Seagate SATA drive. I did not change the 'RAID On', but I did not setup either RAID-0 or RAID-1. As part of my burn-in test, I booted to the utilities partition and ran the HD diagnostics. Neither drive will complete the test. Each fails with a 'Timeout waiting for IRQ' error message. It is never at the same place on either HD. If I set the BIOS setting to 'RAID Autodetect / ATA', both drives pass. This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with the RAID/motherboard. Dell's online chat had me do the emergency Dell Restore that reloads the OS from the hidden partition. I didn't expect that to help. It made no difference. In fact, now I cannot get the NIC driver to load any longer. It sees the card but claims not to be able to find a driver for it. I tried using the Dell Drivers CD, but same story. I even got one of Intel's 'all gigabit drivers rolled into one EXE'. It detected the NIC but hard freezes Windows when trying to load the driver. It sounds to me like a motherboard issue on this 2 week old PC. Dell had lots of different answers, besides re-image OS. They wanted me to manually install Windows. Then they wanted me to boot from the Dell Diagnostics CD because supposedly the Utilities on the Restore partition of my HD were corrupt. Or the utilities themselves were buggy in the version on my HD but had been resolved in the version on the CD. Finally, after many hours of dealing with these crazy theories, Dell is going to replace my motherboard and hard drive. My question is whether any of you using RAID On is able to get the hard drive to complete the diagnostics successfully. I am now wondering if the utilities themselves are buggy. (I mean the HD diagnostics arrived at by booting to the 'utilities partition', not the non-GUI hard drive check available from F12.) Thanks.

TheBomb · Answer

try running the 90/90 diagnostics on the system which is a different hard drive test access it by going to CTRL ALT D as it starts up

BGood2 · Answer

I'm getting the motherboard replaced this week or it is going back to Dell! I just wanted a few other people to run the same diagnostics I ran and let me know if the drives pass. I'm very curious about the included utilities partition. (Now that I can't get the ethernet drivers loaded, a new motherboard is now a must.)

BGood2 · Answer

Well, just got the motherboard and hard drive replaced by a Dell technician. I'm STILL unable to get this hard disk test passed, even with a new drive and motherboard! Still getting 'Timeout waiting for IRQ'. Could someone please run this test on your XPS 410? Maybe there's a bug in the diagnostics? Message Edited by bmgoodman on 11-14-200602:07 PM

tphillips63 · Answer

Forget diags for a moment, does it boot into windows? Does the second drive work in windows? Can you copy files, large amounts of large, small and mixed files between drives? If so then it is working and the diags do not tell you anything except that they have a problem. If this test does not work then you have a problem otherwise you need to find better things to do than run diags :)  In other words, Hey Dr. 'When I do this to my arm it hurts', Dr. replies, 'How about you stop doing that?'

BGood2 · Answer

Well, with Norton Ghost no longer running reliably with the new motherboard (freezes, errors, spontaneous reboots) AND the new motherboard not passing either CPU or Memory tests (diagnostics crash every time), none of which happened with the original motherboard, Dell decided to send me a new PC. If Ghost, which I have relied on for years, had been problem-free on this system (as it was with the original motherboard), I would have chalked it all up to bad diagnostics. Spontaneous reboots, though, under 2 different operating systems, would indicate a larger problem.

Prof007 · Answer

seems like something got overlooked when this system was released... shouldn't be that big of a deal, you may just be waiting on a BIOS update.

doggr · Answer

raid autodetect/ata is incorrect for XPS410. it worked fine on my Dimension, caused me lots of problems on the XPS410. regardless of whether or not you want to run raid, you must set to RAID ON in setup. You control whether or not you are running raid through either the Matrix app or ctr+i during boot, but RAID ON is always enabled in setup. Can't answer about the diagnostic tests, but system boots, runs fine with RAID ON, won't boot with raid autodetect/ata set. After switching back, you may have all kinds of stability problems until you either a: ctrl F11 to norton utility 'as-shipped' partition and reload apps or b: reload windows from disc. Can't tell you why, but i had the same problem: once i switched raid to autodetect in startup when adding 2nd disc, it wouldn't boot. when switched back, serious stability issues. had to finally ctrl F11, reload apps, been fine ever since.

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