Basically, I set up an nvme raid-0 using two 512gb Samsung 970 Pros as outlined by Wendel in an old video [which I am not allowed to link] on an Asus Crosshair Hero VII
And have very happily used that as my daily-driver boot drive for five years.
…yeaaah…
Man, I’ve had some pretty good luck right?
When I told my friends about my slightly ridiculous raid-boot drive one cryptically said “Someday god is going to punish you for your hubris”
Well, Five years down the line, that day has come.
After a random restart, Something got corrupted and now my computer struggles to boot. It hangs and crashes on the little boot screen with the rolling dots. SOMEHOW, 1 in roughly 20 times it makes it through and boots into windows. I’m messaging you from the computer right now, But I’ve been too scared to turn it off for two weeks for fear that’ll be it.
I guess my fun is over.
Two questions,
In theory, I SHOULD be able to to just image the Raid with something like Macrium Reflect, back that up to a different NVME and just boot off that like nothing happened right?
Also, there should be some kind of way to fix whatever is going on with my current system with a Macrium reflect recovery drive right? I’m told its got some way of fixing issues that can prevent windows from booting.
I should just reformat it, but don’t want to. Y’know how a computer you’ve used for a really long time gets… sort of comfortable? It’s like a well worn couch that fits your arse juuuust right. I’m not quite ready to move yet.
At the very least, Ive got all my files backed up. I just need to save my windows install somehow!
I probably won’t be able to help too much here but just to clarify for others who might see this, is there any concrete evidence that the problem is with your boot drives? Could it be some other hardware issue with your motherboard?
Yes, however I wouldn’t be so sure its the raid array causing your problems, if it was corrupted it wouldn’t let you into windows at all… which makes me thing the problem could be coming from somewhere else, bad memory being really high up on the list of suspects.
You could run chkdsk at this point to find corruption, but it might be more prudent to attempt a backup first.
I can’t remember which backup utility I was using (might have been R-Drive) but it actually caught corruption that my RAM was introducing to the backup as I was backing up which clued me into my memory failing. up to that point I thought my SSD was failing; so backing up could actually be a troubleshooting step for you.
That’s… a horrific possibility I hadn’t considered before.
But that being said, Ive been using the machine stably for the last two weeks. Wouldnt an issue with memory or somewhere else on the board have revealed itself by now?
Not necessarily, I had my stability problems for more than 4 months before realizing it was memory. The majority of that time I thought my SSD was dieing because I kind of abused it plotting chia.
Luckily you can mostly rule out corruption pretty fast with chkdsk and then move on to more difficult to diagnose problems.
Memory tests are a easy enough thing to do. Also checking motherboard for leaking caps.
If it does restart try keeping it off, unplugging it from power, then press the power button 10 times. Leave for a minute then try again but only as a last use case because we still don’t know what is wrong
I can say I recently had a x570 machine give all sorts of weird hd issues, even after replacing drives, cables, and power supplies. ECC memory and memtest checked out. Moved them to a different machine and everything worked great. Still have no idea what’s wrong with that box, it’s reliably been a proxmox machine for a few years.
