RAID0 Suddenly WONT BOOT, Partition not recognized [Archive]

pieter3d

10-19-2005, 01:53 PM

I recently ran into a problem with my RAID0 set up. I went to start up my computer and the bios complained that there were no bootable devices. I has previously shut down my computer normally the night before.

So I could see how windows recognized the drives, I started up a new installation of Windows and got to the screen where it shows drive information. I showed my RAID as unpartitioned space!!!! I couldnt believe it.

Does anyone know how this could have happened or how to fix it? Thanks for the help.

My set up:
2 segeate 160gb SATA HD - set up in RAID0- on board Intel RAID controller ICH6
ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz Prescott

Disregard PC setup in Signature Below :)

XmagusX

10-20-2005, 09:09 PM

(Hopefully) Helpful suggestions:
It can happen if you (or windowsupdate) updated your RAID controller's drivers to an incorrect driver. And since windowsupdate seems to always suggest the wrong driver for any device it thinks it should update, I make it a practice to always ignore the "Driver Update" section of that site and pull the latest straight from the manufacturer whenever the site tells me that any device driver has an update. I've done similar things on more than a few occasions with various drivers -- especially when I'm tired or watching a movie and only half paying attention. It's especially fun when you do it and then don't reboot for a week so at that point you've almost forgotten that you updated with the site, and completely forgotten what you updated (not that I ever did that -- really ;-).

Before doing anything else with the partition tables though, you might want to try booting to Knoppix or something similar to see if it can recognize/mount your existing parititions. If they're seen there, then your data should be intact and fine, and odds are just that the Windows install CD tried using an old driver that just didn't handle the conroller properly (that F6 can be a b**** to catch). Just go to the controller's website, pull down their latest drivers, slap them on a floppy, and be sure to catch that F6.

Alternately, you could just drop in another drive -- an old ATA drive or whatever that you can hang off the same cable as your optical drive -- and then install the OS onto that. Then once you're up in the OS, load any drivers needed for the controller and see if you can see the data that way so that you can have a chance to back it up.

If none of that brings you any joy, I'd suggest the next step would be to let the manufacturer's diags run on the drive to see if they bail out with any errors at any point. If they do, run Spinrite (http://grc.com/spinrite.htm) or any other utility that you use for disk repair/recovery, or if you don't have any, then your best bet is just letting the manufacturer's utility have a crack at it. Hopefully the problem is correctable so you can get your backup and RMA the failing drive.

O_O raid0 is that unstable?!
Next option is 5 isnt it?

Rambling reply to this quote:
It just depends upon whether you're going for speed or redundancy. Is RAID0 less stable than a single drive setup? Yes, as it introduces new points of failure since any one drive failing brings down the array. Is it as unstable as some of these posts seem to want to make it sound? Not in my experience, no. The only time I've ever lost data on one of my RAID0s was because a drive went down, so if you treat the array as one big hard drive and back up appropriately, it's no biggie. Given the choice of running two 250gb drives in a RAID0 or one 500gb drive, I'd take the RAID0 every time -- the RAID will run considerably faster and catastrophic drive failure is going to have the same result in both cases.

As for the RAID options there are functionally three levels of RAID for single enclosure use 0 (striping without redundancy -- technically just "AID", but that doesn't sound nearly as cool), 1 (mirroring for basic redundancy), and 5 (striping with parity -- the only way to fly if you're dealing with 3+ disks, IMHO) -- 10 and 50 really only shine when using attached storage that spans multiple enclosures.

Anyhoo, hope some of this was at least mildly helpful. :-)
XmagusX