Corrupt Program Files Folder (Semi-Long Post) [Resolved]

[RobDog888]

I have tried searching and didn't find anything. I wanted to know
if this was a virus, physical hd error, or something else. When my
windows loads (XP) it pops up a balloon telling me that my
Program Files folder is corrupt. Good for me that I have two
drives, but I have lost access to all my programs installed on my
D drives Program Files folder. Everything else was fine.

I scheduled several scan disks with the fix and repair options.
The scan disk does its thing, but it goes through over 100,000
files saying that its deleting attribute (128, ""). And another one
saying fixing minor error in file xxxxxx. These two lines are paired
up to a file in the P&G folder I assume. The thing is that now I'm
getting a corruption notification for the Windows folder.

I have been at this for a day now hoping that I can avoid a
reformat because my system is a headache to load. I am running
two raid mirrors. One mirror for my C drive and the other mirror
for my D drive. Total drives is four. I was thinking about breaking
the mirrors to see if I could narrow it down to a particular drive.

So if ANYONE can offer any suggestions I would owe you a
un-countable amount of thank yous.

Thanks for reading this too.

[RobDog888]

Looks like one of my 120 Gb SATA drive crapped out. Guess its time to
get an RMA for another one and regenerate the mirror.

[Dave Sell]

Looks like one of my 120 Gb SATA drive crapped out. Guess its time to
get an RMA for another one and regenerate the mirror.

Hey Rob,

Just browsin old posts for info on SATA and noticed you been using them for some time. Do you have any opinions on them? I am planning to set up a Raid5 TB box based on SATA drives.

Any thoughts/recommendations? Are the drives very loud? etc..

[<ABX]

Hey Rob,

Just browsin old posts for info on SATA and noticed you been using them for some time. Do you have any opinions on them? I am planning to set up a Raid5 TB box based on SATA drives.

Any thoughts/recommendations? Are the drives very loud? etc..

I have the WD 120GB ATA133 /w 8MB Buffer Harddrive and then upgraded to its SATA counterpart (i'm still using the ATA Drive for data but the SATA is my boot drive). it had a great boost on system preformance.

I have not noticed any extra noise, although i am usually listening to music when i use it but sleep about 5 feet from it so i would notice if it was excessive during the night.

My next hard drive will be a SATA hard drive (well, unless something better comes out ).

[Dave Sell]

I have heard people complaining about an inability to boot to a SATA drive. Is this a problem?

[<ABX]

This depends on your motherboard support. My motherboard, the ASUS AV7600-X, has a built in SATA controller. all it took was changing the boot order to the sata/raid controll (i forget what i excally called in the bios).

and that was it... formatted (super quick) installed windows and it worked fine.

[Dave Sell]

I see. I was planning on dropping a PCI SATA Raid5 controller in an ABIT BH6. This has native support for EIDE but not SATA.

What do you think the consequences would be? Could I see the drives in order to boot to them in that case?

Dave

[<ABX]

That i am not sure of. If your lucky the bios may reconize the controller and boot off of it.

FYI: Standard PCI's maximum bandwidth is 132 MB/s w/ SATA your limit is 150MB/s this means that if you do use a PCI controller you are creating a bottleneck. ATA133 (EIDE) maximum bandwidth is 133MB/s

So if you use a controller card in this situation your are elminating the speed benifit for your sata drives. (the 132mb/s applies to the controller card as a whole so the bandwidth is split between those drives)

You may need a regular hard drive/ floppy / bootable cd to boot from the SATA drives connected to the controller. check out the controllers documentation.

[Dave Sell]

That i am not sure of. If your lucky the bios may reconize the controller and boot off of it.

FYI: Standard PCI's maximum bandwidth is 132 MB/s w/ SATA your limit is 150MB/s this means that if you do use a PCI controller you are creating a bottleneck. ATA133 (EIDE) maximum bandwidth is 133MB/s

So if you use a controller card in this situation your are elminating the speed benifit for your sata drives. (the 132mb/s applies to the controller card as a whole so the bandwidth is split between those drives)

You may need a regular hard drive/ floppy / bootable cd to boot from the SATA drives connected to the controller. check out the controllers documentation.

OK thanks, I do have an old 20GB drive I can use as a boot drive (gotta love having an extensive bone-yard!).

Ya, I know the PCI will bottle-neck the full potential of disk access, but I am setting up a TeraByte SAN box which will be connected to a GB Ethernet switch.

The theoretical limit of GB Ethernet is 1000 MBit/s wich roughly translates to 100 MBytes/s. Assuming an even split between the GB Ethernet card (onthe same PCI bus) and the Raid5 SATA host controller, the controller will take about 66 MBytes/s which leaves 66 MBytes/s available for the GB Ethernet card.

Theoretically, I am only 66% bottlenecked in this case. Combine this with the fact that the PCs are only using 100 Mbit Ethernet cards to the GB Switch, which means 6 PCs could not saturate the PCI bus in this case.

Combine that with the fact that the server will be accessed via VPN alot, which offers a mere 1 Mbit/s bandwidth, and you will see this is an OK situation for the time being.

[<ABX]

I would also like to point out that you could get a new motherboard w/ sata support for as little as 75 USD and a good controller card will be costing you about 90 USD. although you may need new processor / ram (i didnt so i just bought my AV7600-X )

[Dave Sell]

although you may need new processor / ram (i didnt so i just bought my AV7600-X )

That is exactly the problem. I have a 850MHz celeron with 512 MB SDRAM in the ABIT board. I wanted to upgrade it but its pretty much maxed out. In order to upgrade it I would have to get:

- new mobo
- new cpu
- new ram
- new power supply

Which is practically an entirely new system! So I was hoping to make some use out of this machine without doing any upgrades. That's why I chose it as a candidate for the TeraByte SAN box. Also, I wanted to slap SUSE on it instead of WinXP, but apparently Linux support for SATA is very immature, at best. I have heard reports that SUSE 9.2 has native support for SATA controllers, but I'm sceptical. I may be stuck getting yet another XP liscense