A definite ‘OMG moment’ with a computer is when you boot it up and see an error message indicating a problem with your hard drive.
My OMG moment this evening looked like this:
Doubly alarming as it happened after both hard drives in the system - a brand new Dell XPS 420 I received less than three weeks ago - were replaced under warranty less than a week ago.
The PC did boot into Windows Vista successfully so the first thing was to make sure anything essential on the drives was copied to the network hard drive. As it’s a new machine, I have little irreplaceable on it yet.
The hard drives in the XPS 420 are set up in a RAID 0 configuration. A quick check online uncovered quite a bit of commentary where RAID problems, XPS 420 and Intel are all mentioned in the same breath, such as this recent discussion forum thread.
In any event, I called XPS Premium Support - something I hadn’t imagined doing again - and spent an hour on the phone and connected remotely with a helpful and knowledgeable service agent.
The first thing he did was visit the Dell UK support site and download and install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. What happens now is that the console confirms an error with the RAID setup as it now appears every time the computer boots into Windows. That follows the error screen at bootup itself - the screenshot above - which now appears on every bootup right after the Dell logo screen.
What the Dell support agent told me was pretty interesting. The problem I saw is all to do with the Intel RAID controller and nothing to do with the hard drives themselves. He said Dell will be releasing a patch next week that will address the issue, meaning no more RAID controller errors.
According to the agent, quite a few XPS 420 owners have experienced this same error. I don’t know the actual number but that’s pretty alarming news.
Whatever a possible solution, I have no confidence in any kind of RAID setup on this computer. As the Dell agent told me, setting up the PC with two normal hard drives rather than in a RAID configuration would mean no such issues as I’ve experienced.
Assuming the hard drives are perfectly fine, this seems a route that provides quite a bit of confidence and assurance, certainly more than I have right now.
So that’s what I plan to do - start again (again!), install the OS, drivers, utilities, etc. Need to devote time, and soon.
Although I think the XPS 420 is a great computer, this is not a promising start to my overall XPS 420 experience.
