JMicron 36X on Gigabyte DQ6 (v3) ...RAID instability. Help Please.

[HedgeHocker]

Hey hey,


I'm at my wits end as they say about my Gigabyte 965P DQ6 rev3.3
GigaRAID/JMicron 36X controller. I have been Googling for help for a
week now....if you even think you may have a helpfull suggestion please
post a reply.


Alright ..I have two new and verified healthy Western Digital RE2
(WD5000YS) enetrprise hard drives I want in a mirror raid array setup.
The drives are in good condition.
I have a single healthy Western Digital 150Gb Raptor main OS drive on
the Intel SATA controller. The cables are brand new with which came
with the mainboard.

Other drives are a Sony floppy and new Pioneer DVR (SATA).

I do not overclock right now.

Ram is two Buffalo Firestix of 1Gb each in dual channel....ram runs
only with 2.2 volts at any speed and doesn't boot the system
otherwise..... was working with 2.175v - suspect. I have however been
using a new stick of Kingston 512Mb value ram with no difference in the
problem following.


My array will not stay together.

I have the latest drivers and
management software installed from gigabytes site. I have tried the
latest JMicron drivers and software from thier site and it was BETTER -
more stability but it still goes whacky after a while.

Whacky? Huge delay time with Windows in general ( I did reinstall a
clean unmoddified Windows to troubleshoot ) and eventually a total
lockup of Windows (Windows XP Pro btw...) and it hasn't been specific
to any one program.

When I reboot from lockup there is often a drive dropped from the array
and not detected at all! I Hold the power button and power down
completly and then the drive will reappear. It's worth mentioning my
power supply at this point - PC Power and Cooling 750w and brand new.

So ..I keep trying to rebuild the array but they same lag/delay in my
system, locking up/freezing, and drive dropping then reappearing on
cold boot.

What in the hell could be the problem? I am thinking its the driver
buggy or controller gone bad. Is there anything left to try? Update
the JMicron BIOS or does that happen with a mainboard BIOS update? I
have the F11 BIOS for the motherboard. Please go ahead and post
becuase I have no idea what to try next.


Thank you for reading all of this!

 

[doctorx]

got this mb... you have an irq conflict... I had the same issue. go through and disable all unneeded stuff on your mb and if you have pci cards... move them to another slot. If you watch the boot, it will tell you what irq it is sharing with what.

Hope this helps.

Doctor X

 

[HedgeHocker]

Thanks Doc.

How did you resolve it? I just disabled the few things I can in the BIOS.
I've got no add-in cards. The Device Manager says GIGABYTE GBB36X Controller is sharing IRQ 17 with only one other thing - Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 6 - 2849 ..no idea what that is.

Do you mean to say the conflict could be anything? Not at all sure how to reassign an IRQ for a device manually but reading on it... please tell me more about your experience.

 

[HedgeHocker]

The problem was JMicron quality. Western Digital does not support raid, at least with these drives, on the JMicron controller. The drives work perfect on the Intel raid controller. I switched my main drive to the JMicron and the controller does work nicely for just one drive. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You did help me trouble shoot.