Potential RAID problem...

Wertz

Okay my desktop is running RAID 0 across two maxtor HDDs....as of late, I've been having slight delays at initial boot-up....the BIOS seems to stall and refuse to load....the lenght of the stall varies but has been getting loger. Usually lasts about a minute or so.

Now last night when I powered up, the stall lasts about 2 minutes...then I get an onscreen saying something along the lines of "OptionROM will not be loaded" and the version number of the RAID controller.
I power off and reboot but it took several tries before the BIOS would load and windows could boot...

Is this a hardware problem in the making or is it soemthign else? I've decided to leave the machine on until I can get an external HDD and back up all my stuff....is there anything I can do to fix or prevent this problem? My initial fear is that it is something ready to give up on the mobo....the machine is still under warranty.

As ever any advice is much appreciated...

angelofdeath

what motherboard? may need a bios/chipset drivers update

Wertz

It's a Dell 8400 and has worked flawlessly up till a week back when this problem started to manifest itself...

angelofdeath

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/devices.aspx?c=ie&cs=iedhs1&l=en&s=dhs&SystemID=DIM_PNT_P4_8400&os=WW1&osl=EN

try the flashbios updates and serial ata, and chipset
but yeah, get everything backed up asap, it is a dell afterall

Wertz

I've checked and BIOS is latest revision as is RAID controller.

Anyone else got any pearls of wisdom on this? Dell tech support is a last resort. I've googled my problem and haven't turned up any solutions, just similar forum posts from people with the same "OptionROM will not be loaded" problem and no solid answers.

Wertz

heh...finally found out what's causing this, by accident.
There's a usb hub on my monitor that has a card reader plugged in...I boot the PC then turn on the screen (which powers up the USB)...it seems to confuse the start up process or something. It doesn't happen if there is a memory card in it, only when it's empty.
If I leave the monitor off until the machine has booted or simply take out the card reader then everyhting is grand

astrofool

had the same on an msi board with raid (nforce3). I changed a USB option from SHADOW to BASE640K and it stopped complaining.

Capt'n Midnight

BTW: RAID 0 => double the chance of a catostrophic failure that looses all data on both drives. Guestimated probablilty 0.06 per year.

Wertz

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

BTW: RAID 0 => double the chance of a catostrophic failure that looses all data on both drives. Guestimated probablilty 0.06 per year.

Yeah, that's why I was worried about my initial problems...I'm in the process of getting a big enough external drive to back everything up, and perhaps reformatting the array and switching it to just the two drives in master/slave configuration....I really don't push this system to the limit a lot in terms of performance so RAID is just tech for tech's sake (and the system was a steal)...

Buzz_Irl

yea - i have a 8400 and had a software based error on raid startup

i bought an external drive - bacnked up everything and changed to raid 1 - much happier and dont see ANY reduction in performance

only remaining annoying problem is that when i shut down i get a blue screen with a memory parity error - used to get that on an older dell xps in 1990 !!! (still going with new inners) which was fixed with a reformat and reinstall but not on this occassion !