SSD Boot disk error

Question

This is more just a general question about troubleshooting, as I think I know the answer already, but the behavior is a little odd so here goes...

I have two 60gb SSDs striped together (for more space, as its the system drive). On bootup, I've been getting an error on one of the drives for months from the Intel Rapid Storage driver, but it always booted. Recently, I moved the computer and while I am still getting the error, I now get a blue screen on startup.

What is curious to me is that Intel Rapid Storage driver loads up and sees the drives as striped, giving me an error on the one drive, but then it finds windows and attempts to start up.

I used a live CD to run Gparted and it sees both of the drives. One drive is gets an "invalid argument during seek for read on /dev/sda" on Gparted startup, followed by the backup GPT table is corrupt but the primary appears OK so that will be used. Once GParted has started up, that drive is unallocated, while dev/sdb's filesystem is "unknown", with 1mb unallocated.

But since I also have a Microsoft keyboard that had been doing some weird stuff, like just stopping working, I thought I should post just in case that might actually be the problem. These are my first two SSDs so I am not quite sure how it looks when they fail. It just seems weird that Windows would attempt to start up, as it seems like the boot instructions would be spread across the two drives.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

So, just in case anyone comes across this looking for help-

In the end, I used the Intel RSTe dialog at bootup to delete my raid, and then re-striped the SSDs. I ended up with 5gb less of space, so I am going to assume that the one drive with the error has some bad blocks and the RAID driver just ignored them. Once I re-striped them, I get no errors and was able to re-install my OS. Luckily they are SSDs so the install was quick, and gave me an opportunity to move around my user profile and default install directories in Windows.