Areca 1210 Raid volume not recognized

Z

ZeroH

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2006
Messages
442
Hey All,

I just started having a problem with my raid volume that's been working fine for several months.

I had a RAID5 volume (nonboot) on XP for several months working great. I installed Windows XP MCE 2005 on a second partition on the boot drive. After this, the RAID volume would not be recognized in either the original XP install or the MCE install. I keep getting "Cannot Install This Hardware" message on the raid volume under Disks in Device Manager.

The RAID card is recognized and I can manage it using the HTTP Admin tool. It also shows the RAID volume as normal and working.

I uninstalled the RAID disk and rebooted.. now it won't use the areca drivers and gives me the same message as above.

I also tried updating the firmware (1.41) on the raid card and tried the updated drivers (1.20) from Areca.

Here's my specs:
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Opteron 165
4GB RAM
40GB Boot HD
Areca 1210 Raid controller - with 4 Seagate 400GB HDs.

Any help is appreciated.
 
Try sending out a email to Areca they are very good at responding and are pretty knowledgable. Also i'm 99% sure they dives have raid migration so you can take the card and array to a different mobo and still have the array intact, because all the info is stored on the drives or the raid card. When you are booting boot into the bios and see if the raid card reconizes the drives and the volume, if it doesn't you're probably fuxed.

"I uninstalled the RAID disk and rebooted.. now it won't use the areca drivers and gives me the same message as above."

Your removed the disks from the RAID controller? That was probably a very bad move, if the card isn't posting correctly i would look at that first, then drivers. If drivers aren't working correctly either reinstall windows or remove them and reinstall. It looks like you are just having a driver issue so you shouldn't play around with the hardware until the software stuff is resolved. I have the Areca 1230, and they said i would have no problem moving it to another computer or os, so i'm guessing your card should be the same.
 
I am working - however mind-numbingly slow at 1 email a day - with Areca support.

What I meant by uninstalling the RAID disk.. is in Device Manager, I uninstalled the drivers for the raid disk under the Disks label and rebooted to reinstall the driver. I didn't mess with the hardware.. yet. Anyhoo.. Windows won't let me use the Areca drivers.. Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought the RAID volume uses its own drivers instead of the Microsoft disk drivers. No?

I also tried doing a fresh install of windows on a spare drive (swapped out the boot). still same issue.

The card sees the volume just fine and the status of the raid volume is normal so no issues there. It's just getting the volume working in windows.. I see the volume in disk management but only as Unallocated (as in a fresh drive).

I REALLY hope i didn't fux it to the point of no return.

I'm sure RAID migration would be fine too but I don't have another mobo to test with.

Can you check your RAID volume in Device Manager under Disks and see which drivers it's using?

Thanks for the reply.
 
1.20.0.13 the x86-32scsiport drivers, i think it was like an 86kb download for the drivers. I'd make sure you're installing the right driver as there are 2 of them and one of them is a little confusing on which on you should get, try them both. I think it's weird it's not recognizing right in windows.

Maybe try booting into safe mode and installing the driver or reinstalling. Windows might be trying to install some generic driver that is causing problems. Let me know how this goes, as i'm getting ready to migrate my card to a different mobo, i'm thinking i might try to backup the 1.3tb of data first.... not looking forward to that.
 
hmm.. i don't remember specifically selecting a driver file. I usually just point it to the folder where the areca drivers are and it picks the file on its own. I'll look into this again tonight.

I'll try safe mode as well.

I wish I took a backup too.. I cringe at the thought of backup of 1.3TB, let alone my 800GB.
What do you use for backup? I use DVDs for just the important files. Media stuff, I can always collect them again.

Does your setup show specific drivers for your disks?
If you could check it out, I'd appreciate it.
It's under Device Manager: Disks: and it should same something like Areca Raid Volume 00 yada yada yada.
And if you check under driver details, it should show you which drivers it's using.
Mine just shows PartMgrsys, and disk.sys. which is the same for the other non-raid drives i have.
:confused:
 
Yeah,... backup that is on the design process yet, not even close to implementation. I'm thinking of using a hot swap bay and using cheap harddrives as the medium, like 200gig drives to back it up, seems like the cheapest and i can just use old drives and upgrade them,later on.

Under disks it says Areca Raid Volume 00## and it's just the windows driver, from like 01, i'm not at home right now but i can let you know in 9 hours when i'm at home, but it's just a simple windows driver on the disks. The disks are Seagate 7200.10 500gig drives if that matters.
 
well.. trying the driver updated in safe mode didn't fix it either. And i didn't see anywhere you can pick the specific driver file.

I'm pretty sure I'm screwed and I think I know how I did it..
When I was trying to install Windows MCE on the second partition, I had a problem with the installer seeing the second partition as E drive instead of D. So while I was troubleshooting this with some fdisk tools, I accidentally went into a Fix MBR mode.. I didn't think it did anything but I think it must've wrote over the partition table of the RAID volume.

Sooooo.. if you plan to do any updating or changes to the box with the RAID volume, DISCONNECT it before you do anything and reconnect it after you're satisfied with the change.

Thanks for the help oplin. If you know how to fix the partition table for a RAID volume, I'll be your best friend.. lol
 
i'll wait to see if areca comes back with a suggestion first.. thanks tho.
 
yep.. that's the one.

Areca says I should try repairing the partition table.. what's a good tool for this?

maybe there's a way I can recover the data that's on the volume.. i don't need all of it but there's some files that I haven't backed up that I would like to recover.
 
http://www.unistal.com/quick_recovery_RAID.html

That would look like what i would use, but is your data worth 794$ probably not. I didn't see any free ones off hand, but i thought maybe Ultimate Boot cd 4 windows might have a tool in there that can help, i would suggest trying that or at least looking into it. Maybe you can find a copy of that program in a try before you buy type approach, but i haven't herad of too many Raid 5 recovery programs.
 
I think trying out the fdisk tools on UBCD was how I got into this mess. :D Maybe it'll help get me out of it.

I got a list of other tools I can try.. some of them are demo but some are cheap if I want to purchase them.. I'll let you know if I get any success over the weekend.

I really appreciate your help.
 
YES!!! I got my RAID volume back!

And the tool of the year goes to... TestDisk!

With it, I was able to recover the partition table. I checked some of the files and it looks good. I'm backing the important stuff onto DVDs.. after which, I'll recreate the volume.
:D
 
ZeroH said:
YES!!! I got my RAID volume back!

And the tool of the year goes to... TestDisk!

With it, I was able to recover the partition table. I checked some of the files and it looks good. I'm backing the important stuff onto DVDs.. after which, I'll recreate the volume.
:D
Click to expand...

Awsome to hear, and that tool looks really awsome. Great find.
 
Glad to see you came out with a happy ending. I'll be bookmarking that program, open source community looks like it's working out pretty good.
 
oplin said:
Glad to see you came out with a happy ending. I'll be bookmarking that program, open source community looks like it's working out pretty good.
Click to expand...

Always has, always will. ;)
 
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