by
benW » Sat Jan 07, 2012 7:45 pm
The LACE mentioned is running raid and is therefore should be configuration 12 or later - as such will not be subject to the PSU issue of the earlier configuration LACE.
Hal.dll errors can be symptoms of drive failure. Do you routinely monitoring the health of the RAID array such as via Event viewer? You should be able to see IAANT application event messages with ID 4 that describe the state of the RAID array and these may still be present for you to review.
Two failures from how many LACE’s? As generally hard drive failures are not that uncommon (hence why raid was added to the LACE) even from something as simple as a poorly connected lead. But as mentioned with these small form factor LACE's– especially so with the two hard drives, heat ventilation should be optimised and care to ensure that all fans are working without weird noises and none of the ventilation holes are obstructed. Out of interest, was it the same drive in both cases?
Agreed that this also could be a software failure. Some additional thoughts… Did this occur following a scheduled reboot? If so how often and how are you rebooting your acquisition servers? (some have been known to pull the power out!) XP is susceptible to the boot problems if the LACE was not shut down gracefully.
If this occurred after your LACE needed to be rebooted due to some sort of lock up or failure, then this could have caused your problem. If so, you should consider rebooting your LACE more regularly – LACE’s are recommended to rebooted monthly.
Final tip...
LACE’s really should not be used for any other activity than as an acquisition client for the reasons posted, and also because they will require rebooting more often and are likely to be subject to change without any change control (are LACE’s and systems qualified whilst playing solitare, chatting on MSN and manually installing the latest version of IE?).