I am having problems with my domain controller taking an excessive long time to boot.
In the system log it shows that my Domain Controller has been receiving "The device, \Device\Harddisk0, has a bad block."
I subsequently ran ChkDsk which last 7 hours. Once finished the system rebooted and a second ChkDsk began. I decided to stop it and boot into Windows then I got a "service did not start error.
I noticed that under computer management the E: partition did not display the file system type "NTFS" or its file size "30gb". I have a an HP Proliant DL380 which has a built in RAID Utilities, under those utilities the status normally shows "optimal" but is now showing Degraded
What do you guys think it could be? I am thinking that HD0 needs to be replaced but then again I am trying to see if there are any other things I can try before having to do that. I am attaching my system log in excel format .
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Definitely sounds like you have a disk with bad blocks.
How many hard drives are in the machine, and how are they configured, as a RAID 5? Mirror?
If you have, e.g. 5 disks setup in a hardware-based RAID then Windows is going to see that as one disk, number 0. In this case if Windows reports a problem with disk 0 that doesn't necessarily mean with disk 0 f the RAID...make sense?
I am assuming E: is a partition on that drive? If that is true that it's most likely why your getting the weird error on the system type. Personally with all those records of bad blocks and being your domain controller. I would replace the Drive. It's only a matter of time before it fails completely.
Keep in mind that it states \Device\Harddisk0, which was the issue that made it confusing. It could be referring to IDE since it counts up from there first, then SCSI or SATA in the instance I experienced.
I unplugged the CDROM on the machine, the error went away and the freeze up/slow boot issue went away.
Your RAID utilities should show you the status of each drive, indicating which one needs replacing. Theorhetically with a RAID 5 and hot-swappable drives you should just be able to yank the bad apple and replace it, but you should most certainly consult the documentation for your RAID controller before doing anything.
What I was trying to get earlier ( and did a poor job explaining ;) ) is that Windows sees your RAID as a single disk, it has no idea there are actually three physical disks in the RAID, therefore when it says disk 0 has a problem all that means is that the RAID has a problem. You'll have to refer to the RAID utilities to determine the finer details. You stated in your question that the RAID utilities went from Optimal to Degraded, will that utility not also show details for the individual disks in the RAID?
The reason you have a RAID controller returning that you have a bad blocks (unrecoverable read error, technically). Chkdsk won't fix it, and it may even fail to detect it.
This is what the problem is, either 1 of 2 possibilities.
1. If you are in degraded mode (1 disk failed, raid is critical, working off of 2 disks), then one or both of the disks have a bad block but not at the physical offset shown by the O/S.
2. If you are NOT in degraded mode (all 3 disks online), then 2 or more disks have a bad block.
The way you can fix this depends on the RAID controller, or would require some software. Basically you need to run a program that reads all raw blocks on the logical device and tells you the block number that is bad. Then you need to write to that block. It doesn't matter what you write, the data is unreadable and lost anyway, and there may not even be a file there.
The alternative technique is to run software that talks to each physical disk an finds the bad block on each disk. Then write zeros to it. This is a piece-o-cake if you are running LINUX or any unix, as you can do it with a built-in program like dd.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO REPLACE A HARD DRIVE! Unless you not only had a drive failure, but also the FAULT LED failed so you don't know you are degraded.
BTW, this situation is common, and could have been prevented. In the future run data consistency checks often. You have the bad luck to have picked up more than one bad block on 2 different disks at the same location. This is rare, and a data consistency check/repair will fix problem when there is just a single bad block.
A failure scenario that can explain 2 bad blocks in same place is a power loss/surge in middle of an I/O. A ups will almost always prevent a double fault such as this.
- David
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by: Deuce08Posted on 2009-10-30 at 10:55:57ID: 25705343
Try unplugging the CDROM drive, I experienced this recently where the CDROM failed causing havoc on the rest of the system.