Raid 0 Missing Drive

[AngelicPenguin]

So I reset my PC and my gigabyte BIOS kicked in to load up the backup BIOS (happens sometimes on a restart with these DS4 boards, or so I've read.)

The backup BIOS I'm thinking didn't have my RAID configured correctly, so it booted up and I got a RAID error. I went into the BIOS and loaded back up one of my saved ones that had it configured correctly.

Upon bootup however, the Intel utility said my RAID failed. It listed the first drive as being a member but the second was just listed as a regular drive. The Raid 0 array is not my boot drive, so I can get into the OS just fine.

I took a screenshot of what the Intel Storage Manager looks like. The drive under "Port 2" is my second part of the RAID 0 that is not listed correctly. Does anybody know how to get them back together? All the CTRL I options give me are to create a new array, delete an array, or convert to non-RAID, all of which warned me about losing all my data.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/1752/matrix.png

It just seems like it's confused as I'm pretty certain there is nothing wrong with those two drives.

Thanks,
Matthew

[fritzman]

Can you describe the drive setup before the glitch please?

[freeagent]

what happens if you go into the matrix manager on post, and say try to create a new drive, then back out and go back to windows? if i add a new drive, or dont put the cables back into the proper ports, i have to do that, and for whatever reason it just works :D

[AngelicPenguin]

Can you describe the drive setup before the glitch please?

Sure it was a Raid 0 with two 1 TB Samsung Spindlepoint F1s. This was not my OS drive. The OS was on a 500 Gig Seagate and had no issues.

[AngelicPenguin]

what happens if you go into the matrix manager on post, and say try to create a new drive, then back out and go back to windows?

Won't it only give me the option to create a new drive out of the one that's a non-member? How far do I need to take it?

[fritzman]

AFAIK the information about the raid configuration is stored on the drive itself, so if for instance you removed the pair of drives, and put some new ones in, set them up in raid and did some installs, then later removed them and put the original two back in... what happens, is that while the fresh drives are in the pc... the CTRL+I no longer shows the old drives there or their setup., it only shows the new ones. Once you remove the new ones, and put the originals back in, it picks up what their configuration is, and then they become visible in CTRL+I again.

I say all that to suggest that it's not a glitch with the BOS or CTRL+I, but actually with the drive... I suspect something has happened to cause the drive to drop it's information about what is was, and now it is just showing up as a normal drive because it doesn't know any difference..

Not the greatest news you wanted to hear, but that's my suspicion.

If the info on the drive is vital, before you go too far you could google Active Undelete, and download the trial of their Raid Reconstructer version... have a look at what can be achieved with that. That's the best I can suggest.

[AngelicPenguin]

Thanks for the suggestions. After some googling I found a link which helped fix my problem.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help. I found a solution and I thought I'd share it. I was able to recover the broken array using following steps.

1. Reset both HDs to non-member using Intel BIOS utility - the utility warns that all data will be lost - in fact only metadata is lost and can be recreated using steps below.

2. Create a new array with identical settings as the broken array. It is critical that the HDs are in the array the same order as before. I was reconnecting the drives several times and lost track of correct order. Because of that I had to go through the steps twice (I guessed wrong the first time).

3. Get TestDisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org. I used Windows version (I installed a new Vista on a separate HD for this purpose).

4. Run TestDisk according to steps on the web site. If your HDs are connected in correct order, TestDisk should find the lost partition(s) within a few seconds. It ran for several hours, scanning my array and never found anything because I had HDs were connected in wrong order. After I changed the order and restarted from step #1 TestDisk found the missing partition immediately.

5. Have the TestDisk write the fixed partition table to the drive and reboot.

6. Now all your data on the array should be readable but the system might not boot (it didn't for me).

7. Run Vista repair from installation CD to fix the MBR.

8. Last but not least, send a donation to Mr. Grenier, the author of TestDisk.

It was post #6 at this address: http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=312831

I had windows 7, so I used that to do the repair. The only thing I would say I had to do differently was run the repair TWICE. I honestly did not think I would need to run a repair at all since this was not my OS drive, but that was not the case. Upon bootup I got a "missing NTLDR. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart" error. Using the Win7 repair though took care of it. The first time it put some things back, the second time it corrected them (at least that's what I gathered from it's diagnostic information.) Upon booting up, windows 7 did a chkdsk on it and corrected a lot of stuff. At that point my drive worked in windows (I just had to go in and give it a drive letter to get at it.)

I'm thinking RAID 0 might not be for me :)

[fritzman]

Wow... that's awesome bro.

Thanks for sharing the solution... might come in handy.

[Larcen]

Times like that is when it is good to have an external, or spare, hdd that hold all your important data. (That is having one not in a raid 0) I plan to buy an extra 1tb external to keep backup copies of my OS and important files.

[AngelicPenguin]

Thanks for sharing the solution

Sure, just glad to get it back :)