Raid or Hard drive failing - Help!

[cyberock]

I have 4 hard drives set up in a Raid 1. The first two are fine. The second two drives in the raid have been acting funny lately. One of them sounds like it is constantly working and just some funky noises from it. I unplugged one from the raid and booted up. I was able to access the drive and do an error check with the Windows XP utility. After doing that, I decided to reboot with that one unplugged and the other one plugged in now. I was able again to access the files on the drive. I tried to run the Windows XP utility for error checking and that tool failed. I tried plugging both drives back in again, the raid utility asked to duplicate the drive at bootup which I tried and that failed. How do I know if it's the actual Raid failing or the hard drive? I have an Asus motherboard with the built in raid, think it's the P4P800 deluxe. Help! Thanks!

 

[Vegito]

thats the unreliability with ide raids..

you can attempt to bring the 2 failed or 1 working drive to another pc and see if you can access it..

 

[Matthias99]

Do you mean RAID0+1, or do you have your data mirrored 3 times (ie, RAID1 with four drives)?

If you have RAID0+1, and pulled two drives (even alternately like that), you probably just hosed it. After you pull one drive, you generally need to rebuild the array *before* pulling another.

 

[cyberock]

I believe what I'm doing is called Raid 1. I have four drives, they are set up as two seperate raids. The first two mirror each other, and the second two mirror each other.