Hi all,

I need a suggestion for a utility to run to try to see if there are some new bad sectors on my drive(s). I purchased SpinRite, but unfortunately, it cannot see the c: when it the system boots up from the floppy.

I'm having a bit of a problem here, I have an ASUS A8R-MVP mobo w/ a ULI SATA RAID controller onboard. The driver is m5288.sys. For SpinRite to work I have to have a DOS driver for the SATA RAID. I've been through ASUS, they do not have a DOS driver for the controller, they suggested the chip manufacturer. I did get a live session going today with support at NVidia (they own ULi now) and they do not have a DOS driver for that chipset, they suggested the mobo mfr >And so the viscous circle begins!

I have just joined your community and have been looking around. MHDD looks like a good tool, but I'm wondering if it will have the same problem. Does anyone know or have suggestions and advice for me?

Is there even a utility that can do some of this work from a session of XP Pro x64? I know it will not be as complete as the job done by SpinRite or MHDD in a DOS session, but with the system currently acting stable, I would be tempted to run such a utility now, then follow with a low level tool, maybe that's not the right tactic and I am very open to your guidance.

Thanks you for any all all help!

Tom



More junk on the system, issues and what I've done:

The system started acting up and so I did a restart and it posted and loaded windows to the "Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to start" It stayed there for 10 or 15 seconds before a BSD. That has been it's common mode, most times since.

I have two Seagate drives that were striped (RAID-0) back when the system was put together. This is the only striped system that I ever made 'cause I found no performance increment...now I wish I had gone ahead and reloaded w/ the drives mirrored...20/20 hind site!

So, these have become unstable, something's not right, but sometimes they are OK - It's sitting next to me as I do this on my other system. It's booted and I'm logged in right now on it. I've already copied all of the data off of the C: onto another disk, so at least that is safe.

* The mobo is an ASUS A8R-MVP, dual core Opteron processor, 4G RAM.
* The onboard SATA controller is ULi, the driver for it is M5288.sys
* The drive having issues is a pair of striped Seagate 120G drives
(I actually don't know exactly what the drive part number is 'cause I cannot see it in the bay and I'm hesitant to power down while the system is up and acting stable)
* XP Pro x64, SP1

What I've done so far - since nothing has worked, I then went to the next step:
1) I've run chckdsk /f from windows on reboot.
2) I have had to run Windows setup and start into the repair console. From there I've run chckdsk c: /r
3) I've run the Windows setup and attempted a repair of the existing installation and that is why I'm at SP1. When I ran SP2 last time, when it got to the time to restart the system I got another BSD. This morning is the first time that it has booted and I've logged in since last Friday.

Thanks,
Tom