My computer problem

[DarkTom]

Hello folks!

The other day I came home from work, turned the pc on, and it just kinda flashed at me and then died.

It was the power supply. PC World wanted £35quid for a 350watt power supply, I got a new case with a 400watt in it for £27quid from a wee independent shop. Shopper Power!

It took me 6 hours to get it all working again cos I plugged the hard drives in the wrong way round, and had to figure it out for myself. (a friend built the computer for me as I watched)

On to my problem…

I originally had it built with a raid array for video editing for uni, but now I hardly edit at all and it’s more or less an entertainment machine.

It has 2 80Gb drives acting as one fast 160Gb drive, and a 40Gb drive with all my music on it.

I want to remove the raid array, and use the two 80Gb drives as seperate drives, then copy everything off the 40Gb onto the second 80Gb, and then remove the 40Gb drive.

I want to run it with windows and programs on the first primary drive, and all my music and videos on the second drive.

I reckon I’ll need to:
format both 80Gb’s,
remove the raid controller,
connect one 80Gb,
install windows onto it,
connect the 40Gb drive,
copy the contents of it to the 80Gb,
remove the 40Gb,
connnect the second 80Gb,
copy the contents from the 40Gb (now on the first 80Gb) to the second 80Gb.

But I don’t know how to remove a raid array controller.

Can anyone out there tell me how, and tell me if I’m right in what I think I need to do.

There’s some pretty techy guys around here so I hope some of you nice people can help me!

T.

P.S does anyone know where I can buy silver (metal or plastic I’m not bothered) fronts for cd/dvd drives? I think they’re called “Bezels” but I can’t find any anywhere! (My new case is silver and the beige DVD drive “bezels” look pish!)

[ivan]

Are you sure your raid hard-drives will work on ide interface?

[Naomi]

@ivan

Are you sure your raid hard-drives will work on ide interface?

IDE RAID has been around for a few years now Ivan. Uses ordinary IDE disks in a RAID config, much the same as SCSI based RAID uses ordinary SCSI disks.

I have not seen an actual IDE RAID set up, because all those I have played with have been SCSI based on servers. But I guess you can do the usual raid 0,1 , 0+1 and maybe 5 if you are lucky, and JBOD? No specific experience on IDE raid but it surely cannot be difficult to reconfigure the disks. I would guess you want to remove the existing config (Raid 0 presumably?) and then config it as 2 JBODs and THEN format them. No point trying to reformat before you reconfigure. You have a manual for the Raid Card? Is it integral to the MoBo?

PS Never seen a silver bezel…not to say they do not exist though.
Nao

[ivan]

Ah, good then.

[Dave_Coleman]

Wow, you coulda been speaking in one of the natives tongues of a tribe of pygmies for all i understood of what you just said, naomi… boy i wish i knew more about computers

[ivan]

I wish I’d spent less time playing with computers a few years back, maybe I wouldn’t have such a crappy eye-sight now.

[Naomi]

@Dave Coleman

Wow, you coulda been speaking in one of the natives tongues of a tribe of pygmies for all i understood of what you just said, naomi… boy i wish i knew more about computers

Not to worry: I probably confused the issue by saying 2 JBOD’s when I should probably have said a JBOD with 2 disks. Or JBO2D maybe?

Nao

[Dave_Coleman]

Haha its ok though coz no-ones going to dispute what you say! You could be making every word up for all we know

[squirrel]

hmmm…if I were faced with this situation, I’d remove the raid controller, put in one of the 80g hard drives, and the windows CD, and see what happens when it gets to the partitioning thing in setup. Hopefully you can just partition and format the drive and it will all be fine.

CD drive bezels are specific to the drive, if you want a silver bezel then buy a CD drive with a silver bezel. Some of them come with a few bezels and allow you to swap them, I have a Sony DVD-R drive that came with black and silver bezels (I installed it in a beige case, of course)

[DarkTom]

@Naomi

Not to worry: I probably confused the issue by saying 2 JBOD’s when I should probably have said a JBOD with 2 disks. Or JBO2D maybe?

Nao

You confused me with JBOD ???

What’s that then?

I have IDE drives, there is no RAID card, I dunno if it’s part of the motherboard. I’ve got a feeling that the friend who put it together maybe installed the raid controller into BIOS?

My motherboard is an Asus KV8SE 64bit if that helps anyone. The processor is not 64Bit tho, it’s an AMD Athlon 2800, running at 2.2Ghz.

I remember the build not going to plan and him trying to explain how we could get around it and me saying “OK”.

There was lots of disk swapping, from his other pc’s, there was a bit of downloading and boot-disk making, he swore at it quite a bit, and it took bloody ages.

I think this may be a job for the shop. I reckon it SHOULD be straightforward enough, but will probably be dead complicated for me. That’s the kind of luck I have with computers. I’m amazed it still worked after I swapped the case!!

T.

EDIT: It’s a 0+1 raid array I think. It tells me when it boots up. Next time I restart it I’ll check.

[toddw9]

@DarkTom

You confused me with JBOD ???

What’s that then?

Just a Bunch Of Disks

[unisteve]

Is this your motherboard? http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=790&l1=3&l2=14&l3=67 I can’t find a K8VSE listed on the ASUS site.

Your CPU is a Sempron 2800+ if it isn’t 64 bit.

If you know that there is no separate RAID card, and all your drives are IDE, then you have IDE RAID integrated into the motherboard. Good.

You will definitely have to reformat the two drives that are currently in a RAID array. I think it’s most likely that they’re in a RAID 0 array (makes two drives appear as one larger drive and increases speed-- the only downside is that if one drive fails, the entire array fails).

You say you want to run with just the two 80GB drives. Running them outside of a RAID 0 array will make them slower. If you don’t care, then that’s cool.

To disable your RAID configuration (AFTER you’ve BACKED UP ALL YOUR DATA, etc.) you’ll have to go into the BIOS. (There should be something at boot that says “Press Delete to enter BIOS” or “Press F11 for Setup” or something like that…) When you go into the BIOS just start poking around until you find where all your RAID settings are. Disable it when you’ve found it. This will get rid of any RAID configuration you had and make your two drives run separately.

Once your drives are set up, you can re-install Windows. (I don’t recommend using an image of your drives to reinstall unless you haven’t changed hardware/configuration of hardware. Since you have, it’ll be a lot easier on Windows’ underdeveloped brain to deal with a clean slate.)

Hope this was helpful, blah, blah. Tell me if I have misinterpreted anything.

[Naomi]

@DarkTom

You confused me with JBOD ???

What’s that then?

I have IDE drives, there is no RAID card, I dunno if it’s part of the motherboard. I’ve got a feeling that the friend who put it together maybe installed the raid controller into BIOS?

My motherboard is an Asus KV8SE 64bit if that helps anyone. The processor is not 64Bit tho, it’s an AMD Athlon 2800, running at 2.2Ghz.

I remember the build not going to plan and him trying to explain how we could get around it and me saying “OK”.

There was lots of disk swapping, from his other pc’s, there was a bit of downloading and boot-disk making, he swore at it quite a bit, and it took bloody ages.

I think this may be a job for the shop. I reckon it SHOULD be straightforward enough, but will probably be dead complicated for me. That’s the kind of luck I have with computers. I’m amazed it still worked after I swapped the case!!

T.

EDIT: It’s a 0+1 raid array I think. It tells me when it boots up. Next time I restart it I’ll check.

---

JBOD, which, as someone pointed out, means Just a Bunch Of Disks, and effectively means you are using all disks via the raid card, but not using any of the raid advantages: all are seen as normal separate disks. Pretends you do not have a raid card.

It is likely you are on raid 0, which allows your 2 disks to act as one big disk , and spreading them across 2 channels allows for extra speed. Are they actually on separate IDE channels?

The simplest thing you could do is to leave them as a raid 0, and re-partition the 160 into 2 off 80Gig drives. Or even simpler, leave them as they are, do no formatting and no re-installation of windows, and have one folder called music. You could then map that music folder as a drive, so your music appears to be on a different drive letter. This gives you a variable disk size configuration too: your disks could grow to say 40/120 Gig, or to 130/30gigs. Depends entirely how much data you put on each disk. It’s effectively a sort of variable size partitioning.

Do you really need to split the raid into 2 JBOD drives? You lose any speed advantage, but do gain the fact that if one drive goes down, the data on the other remains intact.

If your friend was doing lots of swearing and disk juggling, it suggests he did not really know what he was doing.

If no separate raid card, then within the M/B BIOS, should be the RAID config set up process, which is probably what your friend did. Very few people who work outside of the industry know much about raid, IDE raid is an attempt to give normal home PC owners some of the extra reliability/failsafe options/speed that raid provides. So it should have been made fairly simple to deal with, although, as I said, I have not seen an IDE raid set up myself yet.
Have a good read through your MoBo manual.

My next home PC motherboard will certainly have RAID for the failsafe features it gives me. If SCSI disks were cheaper I would be on them now with RAID 5 and hot spare.

PS: I love those postcards in the window of your local shop “PC problems fixed: cheap” They come around, fail to detect the real problem, mumble about viruses, format the disc, reinstall windows and go. 20 minutes later you find the sound on your computer is not working. I have three friends to which this happened!

Nao

[Andy912912]

@ivan

I wish I’d spent less time playing with computers a few years back, maybe I wouldn’t have such a bad eye-sight now.

Ditto.

@unisteve

…(AFTER you’ve BACKED UP ALL YOUR DATA, etc.)…Windows’ underdeveloped brain to deal with a clean slate. …

Don’t forget to back up the data! My laptop cable broke and the people at CompUSA fiddled around with it and did some junk and deleted the files and I had a 5-page story(when you’re not that good a writer, or typer, 5 pages is a whole encyclopedia/dictionary of every theme known to man…and several known to monkeys!) I was working on and…that Pequeño Larox,(¿se acuerdan?)(Little Larox(remember?)) which is a big encyclopedia that’s litterally so big, the librarian needs this whole…thing used to move fridges and boxes around, that you wouldn’t or don’t wanna call it, I forgot it’s name…it was a file and I didn’t save it on CD or anything.

It’s not that underdeveloped! I mean, it’s good enough for you as you’re probably using it. There’s an oxymoron that’s Microsoft Works, if it doesn’t work, how come the same people that said that are using it and/or playing Xbox all over the place. I mean not to start one of those endless arguments where everyone’s against me(in this case) and stuff…I’m outta here!

[DarkTom]

@Naomi

It is likely you are on raid 0, which allows your 2 disks to act as one big disk , and spreading them across 2 channels allows for extra speed. Are they actually on separate IDE channels?

One cable comes from “Pri Raid” slot on motherboard, goes into one 80Gb and then into the other 80Gb. I think that means that they aren’t on seperate IDE channels?

@Naomi

The simplest thing you could do is to leave them as a raid 0, and re-partition the 160 into 2 off 80Gig drives. Or even simpler, leave them as they are, do no formatting and no re-installation of windows, and have one folder called music. You could then map that music folder as a drive, so your music appears to be on a different drive letter. This gives you a variable disk size configuration too: your disks could grow to say 40/120 Gig, or to 130/30gigs. Depends entirely how much data you put on each disk. It’s effectively a sort of variable size partitioning.

Or I could just leave it as it is, as the 40Gb drive has music and nowt else. So if the raid dies, I still got my music.

@Naomi

Do you really need to split the raid into 2 JBOD drives? You lose any speed advantage, but do gain the fact that if one drive goes down, the data on the other remains intact.

So I’d be changing it to be virtually the same as it is now but just a bit slower and with less storage?

I figured that RAID would fail at some point but I’ve had it for around 3 years now and it’s only been the power supply that’s gone. Three times! Now it has a 400w so should last.

If the Raid hasn’t died yet, is there much chance of it dying at all? I keep it in good shape, back up movies and tv shows to DVD, and defrag it every two weeks. It usually has around 90Gb free.

And all my music is on the seperate 40Gb drive.

Its bloody noisy tho! Basically I want it to be quieter. I bought a “silent” cpu fan and a reduced noise power supply which died and prompted the new case.

I thought that it had extra fans as the friend who built it said the raid would get hot so we loaded it up with fans. This means noise! Since I put it in the new case, I found it to have the cpu fan, a fan in front of the drives which wasn’t working, a wee exhaust fan on the back, and a fan rattling around inside loose.

Now it has a fan in front of the drives that works (I think!), the cpu fan, and another case fan on the back, blowing out the way. The new case has a temperature display and wee sensor, I put the sensor sitting on top of one of the raid drives and it has never went above 36 degrees C.

If I run at 37 degrees C I reckon the pc is fine running at 36.

@Naomi

If your friend was doing lots of swearing and disk juggling, it suggests he did not really know what he was doing.

But still he knew more than me, as he got it working!

I figured that changing the drives around would reduce the noise but I now realise that it isn’t. Any tips for getting it quiet? I have to turn up the volume on the telly if the pc is on!

Thanks for all your help and advice.

T.

[DarkTom]

@unisteve

Is this your motherboard? http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=790&l1=3&l2=14&l3=67 I can’t find a K8VSE listed on the ASUS site.

Your CPU is a Sempron 2800+ if it isn’t 64 bit.

If you know that there is no separate RAID card, and all your drives are IDE, then you have IDE RAID integrated into the motherboard. Good.

You will definitely have to reformat the two drives that are currently in a RAID array. I think it’s most likely that they’re in a RAID 0 array (makes two drives appear as one larger drive and increases speed-- the only downside is that if one drive fails, the entire array fails).

You say you want to run with just the two 80GB drives. Running them outside of a RAID 0 array will make them slower. If you don’t care, then that’s cool.

To disable your RAID configuration (AFTER you’ve BACKED UP ALL YOUR DATA, etc.) you’ll have to go into the BIOS. (There should be something at boot that says “Press Delete to enter BIOS” or “Press F11 for Setup” or something like that…) When you go into the BIOS just start poking around until you find where all your RAID settings are. Disable it when you’ve found it. This will get rid of any RAID configuration you had and make your two drives run separately.

Once your drives are set up, you can re-install Windows. (I don’t recommend using an image of your drives to reinstall unless you haven’t changed hardware/configuration of hardware. Since you have, it’ll be a lot easier on Windows’ underdeveloped brain to deal with a clean slate.)

Hope this was helpful, blah, blah. Tell me if I have misinterpreted anything.

Steve, man!

This is exactly the kind of advice I was after!

Proper step by step and easy to understand, nice one! In laymans terms too!

That is not my motherboard tho! I just checked the box: it is an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe. Maybe it’s just a UK/European motherboard or something?

I am cool with the pc running a bit slower, but as I said in my reply to Naomi I want it to be quieter, but don’t think changing the drives around will do that for me.

Also, I don’t have a copy of windows to re-install !! The version I have keeps telling me it’s not genuine. “Shut up” I tell it.

But hey, seriously thanks a million for your advice! If I had the windows cd I could have done what you told me. And apart from the motherboard difference, you got everything I was after doing right! Nice!

Cheers, man. Your reply has been copied to a text file and kept for reference.

T.

[DarkTom]

The image above is results from some drive speed test, it gives the drive stats in case I have misled anyone through my ignorance.

The image below is my PC properties, just so you know.

T.

[Naomi]

@DarkTom

One cable comes from “Pri Raid” slot on motherboard, goes into one 80Gb and then into the other 80Gb. I think that means that they aren’t on seperate IDE channels?

yes, you have what is known as a single channel master/slave arrangement of disks.

So I’d be changing it to be virtually the same as it is now but just a bit slower and with less storage?

2 separate disks give you the same total storage as a raid 0. If you have both disks on one channel you cannot gain the full speed advantage of using raid 0.

I figured that RAID would fail at some point but I’ve had it for around 3 years now and it’s only been the power supply that’s gone. Three times! Now it has a 400w so should last.

It is unlikely that the RAID circuitry itself will fail. The disks themselves are no more, no less likely to fail as individual drives. Using raid 0 means that when one drive fails, you lose the data from both drives. Raid 1 halves the total storage, BUT when one drive fails you can just replace it with no data loss. [On most SCSI based systems you don’t even have to switch off, just swap the disk, push/pull, no screws, and the raid recovers the missing data automatically. The guys using the system need not even know there was a problem. ]
Fitting a 400 Watt PSU does not guarantee that it will last longer, although it is a good move if you have, or plan to have a big heavily loaded system. The PSU is one of the least reliable components, fails still occur when they still have plenty of spare capacity. When I looked after 1200 PC’s, about 6 a week would have a dead PSU, none were running at more than about half their available output wattage. Reliability also depends on build quality and design. Think how much you pay for a case with PSU: cheap isn’t it? How good do you think the components and build will be?

I figured that changing the drives around would reduce the noise but I now realise that it isn’t. Any tips for getting it quiet? I have to turn up the volume on the telly if the pc is on!

Heat: some SCSI based raid chips do run very hot, but they are not supplied with fans built onto the card and as such still do not need extra fans. IDE raid, I would expect to run much cooler. Raid 0 imposes little extra work on the raid card so I would not expect it to run hot. Using raid 1 or 5 means more data written to the discs, and much more processing within the raid circuits, and as such you would expect the raid chip to be working harder and getting rather hotter, and also there will be some more heat generated from the added disk activity.
Noise. take the lid off. for each of the fans, you can switch on the PC with the fan stopped by your finger. After a couple of seconds take your finger off the fan. See if the noise increases dramatically. Take usual health safety precautions here. The system will not suffer if a fan is stopped for a very few seconds. Other than that you have disk noise, both background from the constant rotation , and additional noise when the disks are accessed and the heads move. Thirdly your case could be acting as a resonant structure, effectively magnifying noise from the fans. Rattles are also possible. Identify the noisiest component: is it faulty, is there a quieter version you can buy?.
Do you need all your fans? CPU fan essential, Fans attached to circuit boards essential. Fan in PSU essential, being the main route for getting the heat out of the case. Anything else is probably just jostling the heat around inside the case, possibly eliminating hotspots.

T.

.

[john_childs]

@DarkTom

Its bloody noisy tho! Basically I want it to be quieter. I bought a “silent” cpu fan and a reduced noise power supply which died and prompted the new case.

I thought that it had extra fans as the friend who built it said the raid would get hot so we loaded it up with fans. This means noise! Since I put it in the new case, I found it to have the cpu fan, a fan in front of the drives which wasn’t working, a wee exhaust fan on the back, and a fan rattling around inside loose.

Now it has a fan in front of the drives that works (I think!), the cpu fan, and another case fan on the back, blowing out the way. The new case has a temperature display and wee sensor, I put the sensor sitting on top of one of the raid drives and it has never went above 36 degrees C.

For info on making a PC quiet(er) check out Silent PC Review. Good info there.

Be sceptical of products claiming to be quiet. Many claim to be quiet on the box, but are not all that quiet once plugged in. That’s where Silent PC Review and other review sites come in.

I recently went through a round of quieting my new PC. Things you can do:

• A quiet power supply that uses a single 120mm fan. Power supplies with two fans create more air turbulence and thus more noise. New power supplies that are more efficient generate less heat and thus need less cooling.

• Vibration dampening gaskets for the fans will cut down on the vibration noise.

• Rubber fan mounts are another option. But they’re more difficult to find than the gasket style dampeners.

• There are also power supply vibration dampeners.

• You can also isolate the hard drives with rubber washers to reduce hard drive vibrations that resonate to the case. The hard drives still need to be grounded to the case so if you isolate them completely with rubber washers and such you’ll need to run a wire from the HD to the case for grounding. There are also commercial HD coolers and mounts that have vibration dampening features.

• Choosing the right case fans. Different fans have different noise signatures. You can’t just go by dB numbers printed on the box. And many fans that claim to be quiet are not. I tried about four different fans before finding one I was happy with.