RAID failure, chkdsk issue on one volume

I'm running a custom-built computer.
- ASUS BIOS v1001
- Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600
- 4096MB memory
- Two hard drives, 400GB each, previously running as RAID, C: (Windows) and D: (Data) on each
- Windows 7 Ultimate
- RAID managed by Intel Matrix Storage Console

The problem started on Saturday when my computer just shut off with no warning. I rebooted and found that the computer was no longer recognizing the RAID, it was now showing I had two separate drives, each with Windows and Data volumes. I started the Intel Matrix Storage Console and got the message, "The Serial ATA plug-in failed to load, because the driver is not installed correctly."

Dr. Google told me that my settings in my BIOS had somehow gotten changed from RAID to AHCI. I checked my BIOS, and found they were set as AHCI. I changed them back to RAID and rebooted. I got the message "BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart" I went back into the BIOS, changed the drives back to AHCI, and rebooted.

(I have no idea how these would have gotten changed in the first place. It did occur to me later that maybe they never had been set to RAID and maybe the software handled all of it. But i contacted the person who set up my computer and she couldn't remember.)

So after setting the mode back to AHCI, I got a BSOD and restart when Windows tried to start. I went into the BIOS again, changed the type to IDE, and rebooted. In Windows, I followed the instructions here and on another site, to enable the AHCI drivers by setting the following registry keys to 0 (zero):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide

I rebooted, once again set the drive type to AHCI in the BIOS, and successfully booted back into Windows. This time I reinstalled the Intel software. It told me to reboot. I rebooted again, changed nothing in the BIOS, got the same BOOTMGR message.

I can't remember if the software had set the type back to RAID and I changed it back to AHCI, or if I just confirmed that it was still AHCI, but rebooting sent me back into the BSOD loop. I rebooted and set them back to IDE AGAIN, but this time around it suddenly started trying to boot from the wrong drive, and the drives started reporting massive corruption.

If I detailed everything I've tried since then, it would take a book. I was just going around in circles with chkdsk and various options in the system repair after booting to DVD. I finally went into the BIOS and disabled the drive it was incorrectly trying to boot to, went back to DVD, and some combination of the following commands finally worked:
bootsect /nt60 C:
bootrec /FixMbr
bootrec /FixBoot
bootrec /ScanOs
bootrec /RebuildBcd

I then ran Startup Repair. After rebooting maybe three times, it started loading Windows, ran chkdsk on the drive, and appears to have fixed all of the errors on both C: (Windows) and D: (Data). Halfway there!

Booted back into the BIOS and re-enabled the other hard drive. (Note I'm still in IDE mode.) When Windows started loading, it asked to run chkdsk on D: (now Windows, on the second drive). A minute or so in, it suddenly started flashing up a message (wrapping, so it was hard to read) saying what looks like "Deleted corrupt attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 353092." I left it to do its thing and went to bed.

When it was flashing the exact same message almost 24h later, I finally cringed and turned the computer off to reboot it. Back into the DVD. Running chkdsk from there in read-only mode, the endlessly-scrolling message says, "Attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 353092 is corrupt." (If I run it with the /f flag, I'm back to endless scrolling of the "Deleted…" message.)

I successfully ran chkdsk on the Data partition on this second drive, so it's fixed now, but I'm stuck on the Windows partition. Even just going into "Repair your computer" brings up a bunch of pop-up errors about various parts of D being corrupted before it lists my windows install on C. (Which it's calling "Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered).) Running chkdsk on D gets stuck in that same loop, no matter what switches I use.

I also can't run bootrec /RebuildBcd now. It pops up a bunch of errors about corruption on D: and reports no operating systems found. (Note that it still WILL boot into Windows if I skip chkdsk upon boot, and while I see some missing things, both Windows explorer and running dir d:\ seem to indicate the volume is mostly ok.

Somewhere online I got the idea that maybe it still had its boot flag set, but I downloaded and booted GParted and, while it showed the volume was corrupted, it didn't show the boot flag being set.

Running Startup Repair reports that no problems are found.

Ultimately my goal is to get my RAID running again. My more immediate goal is to figure out why chkdsk seems to be stuck on an endless loop on file 353092, get it past that to actually fixing the rest of the drive. I really don't want to give up and reformat since, as I mentioned, chkdsk seemed to have fixed my other drive, and my other volume on this drive. And visually, this is the least corrupt of any of them! (It was previously reporting one of them as being unformatted…)

Let me know if you need any more info. (I wasn't entirely sure if this counted as software or hardware, so feel free to move the post or tell me to move this. I should note that chkdsk hasn't reported any actual physical problems with the volumes it's fixed, so I don't think I'm suffering from any type of failure.)

A bit more info. Running sfc /scannow returns the error, "There is a system repair pending which requires a reboot to complete. Restart Windows and run sfc again." (I have restarted windows. It doesn't help. There is a file in c:\windows\winsxs\reboot.xml, but it's dated 2011 and rebooting has no effect. I even renamed the file but I still get the same error.) If I run: sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /.offwindir=c:\windows\ then it does run but at the end I get the message, "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.Log windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log." (I'd already tried this before, I didn't just decide to try it after I posted, but I wanted to report the error. C: isn't offline, so maybe I'm just running the wrong thing? Anyway, it doesn't actually create the log.) I did just run chkdsk on C: again because I remembered I'd gotten an error with that previously. It tells me, "Windows has checked the file system and found no problems." But then I get "Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50."

Hi Figment,

It appears that you have attempted several potential fix-strategies with no final solution as of yet.

And it appears that you have followed strategies discovered from search, but sometimes have lost track of the sequence and details of what procedures you have applied.

Unhappily, I've been-there-and-done-that myself, to the point that I now commonly keep pencil and paper readily available to record and track actions I take when approaching a repair.

You don't mention what Level of RAID you have employed, but it might be that you are using RAID 1 because you apparently have been able to boot to Windows from one or the other of your hard drives, but not both at the same time in RAID.

In most instances, RAID 1 causes all data to be recorded to both hard drives in exactly the same form or mirrored-image, thereby supposedly creating a symultaneous backup. If one drive fails, the other still exists and the user can continue with a working machine… unless a problem crops up in the Controller driver files.
_____________

You've now apparently attempted to repair the functionality of each hard drive separately, perhaps using different procedures on each, but definitely finding differing results on each.

At this point, the two hard drives may no longer have identical data and files, nor may they be capable of working in coordination with each other.

I'm not confident that I have followed exactly what you intended to create and what you have done in your repair procedures.

It may be necessary at this point to start over with a fresh installation.

Please tell us more about what you intended to accomplish by using a RAID array.
There may be an easier, or even more reliable means to accomplish your purpose.

Best Regards

Thanks for the reply! Believe it or not, I did take notes. I'm up to about three pages of, "Nope, that didn't work." But as I got more frustrated with things not working over and over, I did forget to write some things down. I don't think I left out any particular thing I tried, though, I'm just fuzzy on how many times I tried them and in what order. Once I wrote that all out for this post, though, it looks to me like installing the latest version of the Intel software is what caused all of the corruption on the drives and the attempt to boot from the wrong one… Yes, it was a RAID 1. I'm sure the data on each doesn't match any more as far as the Windows partitions, given that I have booted into each separately. The data partitions, with any luck, may still match. My intention in having a RAID 1 was the redundant data. From everything I can tell, what I have now is one undamaged copy of Windows, and two undamaged copies of Data. I didn't set up this computer (and unfortunately the person who did isn't available) so I'm not entirely sure what's involved. But if I can use the first drive as a "master" drive, is it possible to mirror all of that data to the second drive so I don't actually have to reinstall Windows? I have one good working hard drive I can use now. I'd rather just completely reformat the second one and use it to rip my DVDs or something than have to go through reinstalling the huge piles of apps I have installed. But my preference is to get my RAID working again.

I finally got in touch with the person who set up my RAID and she's hopefully going to come out and take a look next week. (LONG time to be without my primary work computer. Yuck.) Wondering in the meantime (to save time while she's here) if there's any solution for this chkdsk problem? Still whenever I try to run it on this second drive, on the Windows partition, it starts the first step, gets about 6% in, and then just starts endlessly scrolling, "Deleted corrupt attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 353092." Same result when I tried running chkdsk in Windows (booting on to the good drive), nothing recorded in Event Viewer. The partition isn't totally unreadable. I can view it in Explorer, and I tried copying a file to it to make sure it could be written to and that worked fine. What is code 128? And more importantly, what could cause it to go into an endless loop like this? I'm finding all kinds of things in Google about this particular error (except for the meaning of the code), and about chkdsk crashing or refusing to run for various reasons, and computers getting stuck in a cycle rebooting and running chkdsk, but I can't find any references to chkdsk itself getting stuck on a single file and endlessly looping like this. What would cause this? Is there any way to find out what file is file 353092 and just delete it? It probably doesn't matter at this point, as we'll probably just end up reformatting this partition, but all my years of dealing with computers, I've never run into this particular issue. It's really bugging me! And I know things will go a lot faster fixing the RAID if I can at least start her out with two uncorrupted drives to work with…

Priorities…. If your data is important to you, back it up to an external Hard Drive. If one Hard Drive really is functional at this time and the other is displaying the Error Codes when running CHKDSK, then get a repacement. If you do the above, your data will have been preserved, and you will have an unconflicted Hard Drive for your friend/tech to work with when attempting to restore your system. Later, you can decide what to do with the possibly/probably defective Hard Drive.

Backing up the data was the first thing I did. At least the bit of old data that I don't really care about that wasn't already backed up… I learned my lesson about backups over a decade ago… Both hard drives are fine. Neither were physically damaged, the Intel software just trashed the data on them when I reinstalled it. Through a long involved process that started the day she came over and is still going now with yet another chkdsk just for fun (I'm currently up to step 51 in my notes that I started taking AFTER everything I already described doing above), we have it recognizing the RAID, bringing up the Intel RAID configuration window during boot, running chkdsk with no errors on both volumes, and running sfc and finding no errors. And startup repair is showing no problems. However we still can't get it to boot all the way into Windows, not even in safe mode. It displays the "starting Windows" animation, then I get a black screen with a cursor, but the log-in screen never shows up. It hangs there, sometimes for 15-20 minutes, with the hard drive spinning, and then eventually reboots with no error. I thought maybe this was the RAID software verifying the data, but it still does this over and over even after the Intel boot screen said the RAID was verified. It's getting far enough in that the sleep function works if I don't wiggle the mouse every now and then, and if I boot into "Repair your computer" in the F8 startup options, it's recognizing my username and password. So Windows definitely isn't… dead… Both of us are pretty much down to searching Google at this point. Given the way it's acting, we both suspect it's something stupidly simple, like a single corrupted driver or wrong setting or something, but we have no idea how to fix it. (I think this whole thing started out as a stupidly simple problem where my own attempts to fix it ended up causing the rest of this mess in the first place.) We can't find any logs or utilities that are telling us anything useful. She's not a RAID expert, she just knows more than me. (She's normally a server admin.) So we're both hoping that someone on here who has a bit more experience can point us in the right direction. (We're still not even entirely sure from reading the manual if the BIOS is supposed to be set to RAID or AHCI. We're finding conflicting info.) My thinking is along two paths right now: 1. What could cause Windows to start booting to the point that I get a blank screen and a cursor, and what can we do to troubleshoot it? I tried enabling boot logging, but it didn't show anything suspicious. Are there any other commands, or tools, or logs that might show us what's causing it to hang? Is the fact that it's calling the operating system "Window 7 Ultimate (recovered)" important? 2. Do we even need this Intel software? This was originally an XP machine. The motherboard supports RAID and Windows 7 seems to support it through computer management. If it's the Intel software that started this mess (and Google tells me people hate this Intel software), would setting the drives back to IDE so they boot, uninstalling the Intel stuff, and using Windows to create the RAID be a better option? ANY help is appreciated. Thanks!