How do you determine which drive is attached to \device\ide\ideport3?

[P5-133XL]

I'm getting lots of atapi controller errors on \device\ide\IdePort3 (EventID 11) on my domain controller (WS2008). After a bunch of them the machine reboots with a volmgr error (eventID 45) "The system could not successfully load the crash dump driver" so it doesn't tell me why it blue-screened. It BSOD about once every 3-5 days.

If it matters the C: drive is mirrored (MS software RAID) to a second HD. The only drives not mirrored are backup drives. No partitions have failed though it takes about a day to re-sync the mirrors after a BSOD. Chkdsk does not find anything bad on any drive.

I'm starting to think I need to reformat (slow form) every drive and re-install the OS from scratch but I'd really like to ID the problem to a specific drive (I have 6 SATA drives on that machine).

Any hints as to what I can do to limit the amount of work/time and still find the problem. I have already replaced all the SATA cables.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm guessing there are a bunch of identical drives, right?

Device Manager will show the drive serial number under the details tab, listed as "Siblings." If you you look in Disk Management, you should be able to see which drive is considered port 3 (which SHOULD be the 4th port overall) and correlate that to the physical drive S/N. Yes that probably means shutting the system down but if you're already losing the better part of a day to integrity checking, 20 minutes isn't anything extra.

 

[P5-133XL]

All the mirrored drives are the same. Both backup drives are unique (One for Windows server backup, and one a share for backing up all the client machines).

So Drive manager lists the drives in IDE port order. That's useful information. I previously refused to make that assumption.

I'm not really losing a day when re-syncing for the machine still runs while it is occurring. Drive access runs quite slow though.

P.S. If there is one really big annoyance with WS2008 is that Windows server backup will not use a drive larger than 2TB and will not use any advanced format drive of any size.

 

[Mercutio]

Server Backup will back up through iSCSI or to network shared drives though, so that's one workaround.

 

[Mercutio]

The disk ordering rules are pretty much the same as the rules for ARC paths in the old boot.ini files.

The computer I'm using right now has its C: drive on IDE1, disk 0 - it's the first drive on the second physical controller. It's listed as drive2 in Disk Management, after the two disks on the first SATA controller have been enumerated.

SATA ports are still numbered by the hardware manufacturer, so yes, you should be able to go by that. The only complication might be on a system that has multiple disk controllers.

 

[P5-133XL]

By the way - the siblings number appears to be in hex and the S/N is mixed alpha-numeric. I can't match the siblings to S/N's.

There are multiple HD controllers, just to complicate issues.

I ended up running Seatools for Windows (so that the DC an be up while running while the diagnostic runs) and while it is still busy with the long generic test (aprox 6.5 hours per drive), it quickly flagged one of the Samsung drives as bad and it gave the S/N that I can use to find the specific bad drive. It won't take very long to pull each drive and look at each S/N. I can easily keep it down that long, If I can control the time it goes down.

I'm actually surprised it had access to individual drives of the mirrors while the server still runs. I just assumed that it would need exclusive access to the drives like chkdsk does so that I would need to run the DOS version which would have kept the Domain controller off-line for an extended amount of time. I was pleasantly surprised that I was wrong.

 

[P5-133XL]

Oh and the failed Samsung drive is still under warranty.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Mercutio]

Since I see this, I brought up the Details tab on a couple other machines.
My machines that are using a "Standard XYZ" controller, which I assume to be a Microsoft driver, list the drive serial number under Driver Details SOMEWHERE, but on the H61-base machines in my classroom it's actually different between Windows 7 and Windows 8.

On the Core 2 Duo machine I'm sorta working on right now, which is using "Intel XYZ Serial ATA Controller Driver", the drive's serial number is not available under driver details at all.

So that's not as universal as I thought it was.

 

[time]

[Smacks head]

I'm a fool - the AMD RAIDXpert utility clearly lists the serial number (readable) against each drive. Thereby continuing to confirm my feeling that it was a more robust faux RAID solution than Intel's effort. All academic now - Intel well and truly won the war.

 

[P5-133XL]

Merc, just as a side note the drive that failed was the 6th drive listed in Drive Manager.

It was the drive used for Windows Server Backup.

It has now been swapped-out and awaiting Seagate.