[aklug] Re: Wife's hard drive is failing

Whats this? A manual for RaidXpert? Online even? This could actually
save me a ton of trouble and facilitate a "Plan A" recovery.

Until she started complaining about these errors, and I saw them
myself, I didn't realize that her precious Win7 box was using a raid
in the first place. A raid of one lonely drive? Well, thats how it
came from HP. I know she didn't do this. But the fact that it is this
way might make this whole problem of a failing drive be very easy to
fix.

Googling some of the errors and "AMD RaidXpert" it looks like I'm
seeing two sets of errors. One is a "task 20 timeout" or "task 30
timeout" and the other is a SMART error. Querying the drive through
the BIOS utilities does tell me that there is a SMART error. One of
the suggestions that seems to be pretty common for the first set of
errors is to simply disable RaidXpert in the first place. The logic
there being that if RaidXpert isn't running AT ALL then it can't give
you a "task 20 timeout" error, and you can be blissfully ignorant.

But... but... its been running FINE for the last 2-3 years (however
old her computer is, I don't recall, but something like 2-3 years)...
and the SMART errors aren't coming from some phantom RaidXpert
software glitch. I can reproduce them with the BIOS diagnostic tools.
So it seems rather shortsighted and ignorant to disable the very
support software that is trying to tell me about a potential
disaster-in-waiting.
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Received on Tue Nov 13 12:44:48 2012