My Problem:

I have an HP ML 115 G5 server that uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. I have two pairs of hard drives that are mirrored. The Windows Server 2008 event log was displaying the following errors reported by the nvstor64 driver:

Event 129 nvstor64 “reset to device, DeviceRaidPort2 was issued”
Event 5 nvstor64 “A parity error was detected on DeviceRaidPort2

Sometimes the errors would appear five to seven times per second and bring the server down to an unusable crawl. Windows started seeing disk errors with the drives that were presented to it by the controller:

Event 51 “An error was detected on device DeviceHarddisk0DR3 during a paging operation”

Eventually NTFS corruption began to be seen:

Event 55 NTFS “The file system structure on the disk is corrupted and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume [volume name]“

My Solution:

The drivers are likely to be old or corrupted. In my case they appeared to have been corrupted after performing a bare metal restoration of Windows SBS 2008. Download the latest MediaShield package for the nForce chipset that is in your server or workstation from NVIDIA’s driver page (in my case with an HP ProLiant ML 115 it was the nForce Professional 3000 Series chipset). Then, carefully consider the danger of installing the drivers. In my case one of my two mirrors were broken apart and I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID utility and rebuild the mirror pair. Make a good backup of your system if at all possible (rather difficult if you’re having storage controller issues. You may want to remove and image your hard drives for safe keeping.

Installing fresh, new drivers may solve your problem. It did for me.

The Long Story:

I sought out help from HP’s own technical support and was pointed in the direction of this HP Support Forum thread. From that thread, you will be led to many others with similar troubles. It all seems to be centered around the nvstor driver and its interaction with the NVIDIA nForce chipset. It was as if the driver had been corrupted somehow. The ML 115 uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. That chipset uses the NVIDIA MediShield suite of tools that contains the drivers and utilities to manage it all. You can find specific NVIDIA drivers here at NVIDIA’s driver page. It just seems wrong to be on NVIDIA’s site parsing through graphics card drivers to find storage drivers for a server. Oh yeah, that’s because it is wrong!!

What’s especially troubling is that there is no link for the Windows version of the NVIDIA chipset drivers or the MediaShield suite of tools on the ML 115′s own drivers and support page. The only drivers on HP’s official page are for RHEL 5. I’m all for more Linux drivers in the world, by why not also offer the Windows version? The crazy hoops one has to jump through to find the exact chipset model number and then learn about NVIDIA’s nomenclature concerning how they package their drivers in a MediaShieled bundle is less than ideal.

Nevertheless, after finding the latest drivers on NVIDIA’s own drivers page, I installed the MediaShield package. Unfortunately, it broke apart one of my two mirrors, so I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID software and rebuild the array. That was an unnecessary bit of drama. Once that was rebuilt, I monitored the event log for days and none of the nvstor64 errors returned.