nforce4 nvraid and 6.86

[wiper]

I've been running the same install of windows now for a year or so and decided it was time to wipe the system drive and reinstall. I had a couple 250gig drives from various projects in a raid0 array for temporary storage which is why I wasn't concerned about mixing sata/pata. The array had been working perfectly for months but after the reinstall and installing the latest drivers 6.86 (I was running 6.70 before the reinstall) windows and/or the nvraid drivers will *not* see the pata drive as available for use in the array, the nvraid bios will see the array as healthy though. Instead windows and/or the nvraid driver maps the pata drive as a normal drive on the regular IDE channel. So, I rolled windows back to before I installed the 6.86 and then installed 6.70. Now windows will put the drives into an array but it still only sees half the data so I end up with a 463gig drive with only half of it with any partition information and 233gigs of unallocated space. I'm starting to get the feeling that the 6.86 drivers hosed my array which normally wouldn't have been an issue since it's temporary storage, however, I used that drive to backup my system drive before I wiped it so I've now lost years worth of files :/

Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

[drizzt81]

Am I guessing correctly that your array was made up of a 250GB SATA and a 250GB PATA drive?

So let me recap what you did, just to make sure:

You "backed up" your system drive to the RAID-0 array which had no other valuable data on it. You installed WinXP on your system drive, formatting the drive in the process. you installed the nvidia 6.86 drivers on your system after doing so, the WinXP install did not recognize your HDDs as a raid array, but rather individual drives you installed the 6.7 drivers over the top of the 6.86 drivers, hoping to recover the data it did not work

Did you 'touch' the RAID-ed array with any tool while it was in the messed up state? Have you considered to reinstall winXP with the 6.70 drivers?

[wiper]

You would be correct except that I used windows system rollback to get rid of 6.86, I didn't try to install 6.70 over the old ones.

The drives were physically unplugged and the raid controller disabled during install due to me being too lazy to re-make an install cd with the drivers on it (lost my old one in a move). I plugged the drives in and reenabled the nvraid controller and it recognized the array without having to do anything in the raid bios. The only thing I ever did was attempt to open the drive and got a format error so I went into disk management and saw it screwed up. I used the nvidia windows raidtool to verify that the only drive the drivers are seeing as part of the array is the sata drive.

[Madwand]

Sounds like a nasty situation. I suggest contacting nVIDIA support by internet on this issue to see if they can help before doing anything that might further endanger your data.

If that data really matters, I'd even consider buying new HD's and doing image copies so that I always had some fallback point.

[wiper]

Well, I deleted all of the partitions that windows showed for the half used array and used a recovery program to recover enough to get a 100% error free copy of the image of my system drive. I tell you what, this recovery program is the best $80 I ever spent, 5 years old and it can still recover somthing like this! I'm now able to partition the drive and format it and use it with no problem, I just can't upgrade the ide drivers from the ones that came with 6.70 which is a compromise I'm willing to live with. Thanks to those that took the time to reply!

[drizzt81]

thank YOU for letting us know how you "fixed" the issue :)