Accidental CMOS clear - RAID 1 wont boot

M

Montinovich

n00b
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Oct 4, 2010
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Hi all, first time poster :)

Yesterday I somehow managed to press the CLR CMOS button on my motherboard, but at the time I did not know what it did. I'm running RAID 1 on two 1tb Samsung Spinpoint F3 on an ASRock x58 Extreme6 mobo and the pc would not boot properly, but i somehow managed to get into windows which ran somewhat laggy, so i shut down the system and found out that I was supposed to go into BIOS and change the HDD setup to RAID before going into windows after a BIOS reset, which was then too late.

I tried to put in the Windows 7 disc (64bit) and tried to run the repair options, but none worked as they all stated they needed some files or something of the like (which I assume is messed up due to that I went into windows after the CMOS clear). I don't mind doing an OS reinstall, as long as i can just preserve the data on my HDD's somehow. I tried plugging the F3's into an old Dell dimension E520 with Vista, which recognized the drive in BIOS but didn't show in "My computer". I also tried hooking up the E520's HDD to the pc with the RAID HDD's but just after the green vista loading bars a quick blue screen appears (just a quick flash) and the system reboots. Right now I can't even load the windows 7 disc, as it says: "Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause" when i boot from the disc drive and the HDD's.

So i just want to access the data on my F3's so i can backup what is on them, but I can't even get them to show when plugging in to the E520. Also, I want to get windows 7 up and running again (don't mind reinstalling and recreating the raid if i just have the data backed up). Could I just remove one of the hard drives and then delete the RAID volume in the RAID utility, do a clean OS install and then configure raid again or something? Sorry for the long post and confusing explanations but I don't really know where to go from here. Thanks in advance, I appreciate your help!
 
In case of a RAID1 both disks should contain the same data. You should be able to boot from each single drive without problems. Was it an Intel RAID1 or did you use a different onboard controller like Marvell? I suppose you managed to get into Windows once, but this no longer works?
 
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I have tried to boot from each individual drive, but without success, that's where the windows error occurs which tells me to insert the windows disc and do a repair. But i can't even boot from the disc drive as the same error occurs.
 
If you connect the drives to another PC, do the drives show up in the Windows partition manager?
 
I just managed to get it working again. Switched the HDD's around and was able to boot with the installation disc using just one of the HDD's, then i could do a repair which let me log into windows. I could then plug in the other HDD and go into BIOS and reconfigure the HDD's to RAID setup, and when i log in to windows now it says in the Intel Matrix Storage Console that it works normally and is rebuilding the raid. I just hope it doesn't matter if i turn the system off while it is rebuilding, as it's on 1% after 20 minutes and I don't have any more time right now xD Sorry for the bother, but I appreciate the help, thanks a lot :) And I'll definetely keep my hands away from the CLR CMOS button from now on :rolleyes:
 
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