Strange Hard Disk Issues.

My computer has been running happily with a RAID 0 consisting of 2x 320gb Maxtor SATA hard disks for approximately a year.

Because I know what I'm doing, I'm perfectly happy with the risks so the RAID will be staying once I get this fixed, but with a nightly backup system in place once I can get hold of a big enough single hard disk.

Anyway, here's the problem: Vista bluescreens just after the point where Windows switches to the Nvidia RAID driver rather than directly accessing the RAID via the BIOS (well, I'm pretty sure that's what happens). In simple terms that's when all the drivers listed when starting safe mode have been loaded, or when (in my case) the hard disk cuts out for about 3 seconds, before resuming booting.

The data on the RAID is still completely intact and without any errors, according to Paragon Partition Manager, which accesses it without the need for a driver. If possible I would like to avoid having to copy the partition to another disk (which I would have to purchase), repair it in some way, and then put it back on the RAID.

The problem began after I ran a Diskeeper Boot-time Defrag - after showing the normal Vista boot screen, the screen went blank with a lot of hard disk activity for about 15 minutes, then Windows started but displayed some very weird behaviour - many services (such as automatic updates and event viewer) refused to start, as did several programs. Assuming it was a temporary error caused by the MFT defragmentation, I restarted the computer and that was when the problem began.

Somehow Diskeeper has managed to make the RAID incompatible with the Nvidia drivers.

Here are some solutions which I have tried:

* Booting from the x86 or x64 Vista setup discs, or the x64 recovery CD (basically a subset of
what is available on the setup disc) - the hard disks make a repetitive noise for about a
minute every time setup attempts to access them and loading the official RAID drivers makes
no difference.

* Booting BartPE - when loading the RAID driver two different floppy drives and 10 floppy
disks have all failed to be read correctly, which suggests a motherboard issue (?)

* Paragon Partition Manager (which is awesome software btw) detected everything and allowed
me to selectively copy some critical files to a flash drive, and if it comes to it, I could copy the
whole partition to a new drive. Running its equivalent of chkdsk /f detected and fixed a few
minor errors (invalid file attributes), but it didn't manage to fix the problem.


Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI using the onboard RAID controller.

While purchasing another hard disk to copy the partition to, allowing me to repair it would probably fix the problem and allow me to put it back on the RAID, I would rather avoid having to invest in a new hard disk if possible.

So yeah, if you have any ideas on how to fix whatever is stopping the official Nvidia driver from reading the RAID I would love to hear them

SOLUTION.

For future reference, here is how to fix the problem:

1. Begin installing TinyXP Rev09 (with driverpacks included) on another hard disk or partition.

2. When it gets to the stage where it first reboots during the installation, chkdsk should run on
the faulty partition, fixing the errors and resetting all the file permissions in $Secure.

3. While the partition is now technically in working order as far as the file system is concerned,
the file permissions are all set to the defaults therefore preventing Windows from booting as
certain system files cannot be accessed due to missing permissions. The problem manifests
itself as a black screen with movable mouse cursor (a.k.a. the KSOD). All the normal
solutions to the problem fail, and while secedit with /areas FILESTORE would probably fix
it, it is impossible to run it without actually being in the Windows installation that needs
fixed, which is a pretty big mistake on Microsoft's behalf.

4. To restore the file permissions, create the UBCD4Win with default settings (doesn't really
matter) and boot using it.

5. Next, open MS Explorer, right click the faulty partition, go to the security tab and set
Everyone to have Full Control.

6. Reboot and problem solved.



It took me an entire week, but my computer is now working again (without having to format, or even reinstall Windows)


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