I'm on my Sony Vaio VGC-RC210G and whenever I restart, a message pops up saying "A drive in a RAID 0 volume is failing. Try to back up data immediately."
I believe I'm using 2 160GB Maxtor drives, 1 on RAID 1 and the other on RAID 0.


I haven't noticed any problems, but maybe that's just because I've had the problem for so long. Any suggestions?

One reason you may not have more responses to your post is that unless you really went through the trouble to set up both RAID1 and RAID0 arrarys on the same 2 disks it may appear that you're confused. If you had such a setup you'd likely know it.

...that said do you have a RAID0 or RAID1...or do you really have both type of arrays on the same 2 disks? Its kind of important that you know this...and I do hope you have good, tested, backups.

I didn't set it up, this is how it came, but now that I look at it closer, I think I only have RAID 0.

Okay, well, onboard RAID controllers do get squirly. Back up your data, ASAP, because if the array goes its gonna take some effort, prayers, or an act of God to get your data off the array. Best to kill and rebuild, studying what may have caused the failure (bad disk).

RAID0 is not generally forgiving. One disk goes...the array goes...your data on the array is G O N E...unless you have a good back up.

I know I repeated myself, trying to stress my point.

Should I get new HDDs?

Well, that might be premature, but you could do that. Do you have any other signs that the drive(s) are bad? ...any other errors, any audible clicking?

As far as I know, this is the only problem, and it has persisted for a couple months with nothing else happening.

You could try a chkdsk c: /f in cmd prompt and tell it to run the next time windows starts. This will check your disks' filesystem for bad sectors or other errors and fix them. If it finds bad sectors you may want to look at buying two new drives or just one if you don't wanna do raid 0 again.

And, as was already mentioned, back up any important data you have just in case!

Well, you could just back up your data and keep your fingers crossed. ...but were it me I'd probably at least rebuild the array and re-install Windows. If the error persisted I'd replace the drives.

You cannot get data off raid 0 once you break the raid. I don't care what you think you know but you cannot get data off a raid 0 once you break the raid 0.

This is why raid 0 is bad and you should never ever ever use raid 0 ever.

Raid 1 or Raid 5 should be your options. Raid 0 should be banned and removed from every chipset in existence.

Don't forget to remove the raid entirely or use raid 1.

Under my computer how many drives does it show you have? How large are they? If you have more then 1 try saving data to both of them. honestly it doesn't even sound like your system was ever raided.

Port 0 is not raid 0. sata ports on mobos are labled starting from 0 not 1. If your system was in raid 0 and it failed it wouldn't start.

It shows in his first picture that he's using Raid 0, in the second picture you can see the array. In the first picture you can see he is using Basic Mode for the IMSM program, for the second picture he switched to advanced mode which shows the array.

Like i said before, try chkdsk c: /f in cmd prompt to see if that drive has bad sectors or anything. If not then you may want to try right clicking on the Raid 0 array called Volume 0 and Verify Volume Data. Also if you right click the drive with the error there might be some options, but i'm not sure doing either will fix anything since there is no redundancy on raid 0.

Most likely you'll have to back up all your data and delete the raid array (from the RAID Bios, should see it each time you start the computer) and recreate it or not recreate it all. Then install windows again. Or... you could live on the edge and see how much longer you can go before it totally dies.

My question is still relevent. he says he hasn't noticed problems. if indeed his raid 0 failed he would have lost some data and that would be a very noticable problem.

Also if this is an actual matrix setup and there are multiple raid volumes on partitions they would have showed up.

If windows reports 2 drives at 160GB a piece then his setup is in JBOD mode.

If it reports a total less then 320 for all drives then he does indeed have a raid 0 and a raid 1 setup.

IF it reports multiple drives varying in size with a total of 320 then he has 2 raid 0 arrays.

Of course my method will not work if he has 2 raid 0 arrays at 160GB a piece. but then again that would mean he doesn't have a raid 1 setup either.

I've had RAID 0 arrays fail on this rig, that I've put back together and continued happily. Perhaps they didn't fail hard enough. Didn't take much effort to put them back together and it was not calculus. That's not what I think I know, that's what I indeed do know.

This is on an Asus Rampage Formula with X48 chipset and ICH9R sb.

Did you even read or look at anything he posted in his first post? The pictures SHOW that it IS a raid 0 array, not jbod, not raid 1. His raid array has NOT failed, he is getting a message that one of the drives is failing or may soon fail which at that point would cause his raid 0 array to fail and no longer boot windows.

The OP wrote
I believe I'm using 2 160GB Maxtor drives, 1 on RAID 1 and the other on RAID 0.

I'm only trying to confirm his actual setup cuz it only shows 1 volume. He says he has both a raid 0 and a raid 1 yet only 1 volume is listed. There is a possibility he is mistaken and in order to help him we should at least confirm his raid configuration.

There's nothing to confirm, look at the first picture in his first post. It says, "Raid 0 stripes user files across multiple hard drives, increasing hard drive performance." He's in basic mode in that picture so there's nothing he can click on for that message to appear, it's just there. He must be using an older version of the software though because I am running a raid 0 and it does not show that message.

When I look at My Computer, it displays one disk, C, that has a total size of 291. I'm currently using version 6.1.0.1002 for the Intel Matrix Storage Console.

Also, I just found out that the drives are Seagate Barracudas (ST3160023AS) and I only have 4 GB left, if that helps at all. I'm in the process of verifying the data right now.

Edit: Verification is done. It said that 5 blocks were reassigned and there were no verification errors.