Recovering from a SATA Raid Failure?

[icowden]

System:-

Asus K8V motherboard
1024Gb Ram,
Athlon 64 3000+ processor
Seagate Barracuda Sata 150 250gb HD
Maxtor 30Gb IDE HD
Maxtor 60gb IDE HD
Hauppage WinTV
Wireless Network Card
GeForce 6600 AGP Graphics Card
Creative DVD rewriter


Hi all,

I have been running my system from my SATA Hard Drive which is configured as a single drive RAID 0. The last couple of days XP has required an integrity check on boot and has been having a problem with a particular sector.

Anyway, to cap it all, yesterday when I switched on, strange boot message about HAL.dll not being found. I finally figured out that my SATA drive is no longer being recognised in the BIOS. FastTrak knows it's there but tells me that no RAID arrays are defined.

I've ordered a duplicate drive (am going to change to Raid 1 if I can get the original drive back working) and some recovery software, but I can't get the drive to show up on a PEBuilder Boot disk nor in the BIOS. I have gleaned from another thread, that I may need to turn the RAID controller off first, which I'll try tonight.

My main question is what happens if i tell fastTrak to build a new RAID 0 array (there appears to be no array to rebuild or delete)? Will that effectively kill all my data?

Advice greatly appreciated.

 

[Nodsu]

Hrm.. A very liberal use of the word "drive" here. Maybe try again using "drive" for a physical hard drive and "array" for the RAID set of two or more hard drives?

Single drive RAID0? What do you mean by that? RAID by definition means multiple hard drives.

 

[icowden]

A single drive RAID 0 array is exactly what it says. It is quite common these days to hook a SATA drive up via a RAID controller to improve drive read/write times, even if it is just one drive.

As such, even as one drive, it has to have an "array" defined (even though it is the only drive in the array). However, the fasttrak controller now says that the array definitiion is not there, and I don't know what will happen if I redefine the array.

 

[Nodsu]

... The fact that the (retarded) controller logic requires an "array" to be defined does not make that single drive any kind of RAID.

And I really doubt that a fakeraid controller has any better performance than a non-RAID one. (Or do you have real hardware RAID there?)

Anyway, If the drive does not show up in RAID or normal BIOS (on the non-RAID controller), then it's probably bad. You can try it in another computer with another cable just in case of course.

Your only chance of data recovery is a PCB swap or the services of a data recovery company.

 

[icowden]

Happily I ignored your advice.

The K8V motherboard has an onchip RAID controller. The SATA drive I hooked up was controlled by the RAID controller and had a RAID array. Splitting hairs about what is and isn't RAID is neither useful nor helpful.

It appears that the RAID array definition somehow got lost from the fasttrak bios (is it stored in the bios or on the drive - no idea?). Anyway, I bit the bullet and asked fast trak to create a new RAID 0 array and allocated the single drive to that array.

Once it was allocated, the BIOS could see it. It appears that the only way the K8V bIOS sees a SATA drive is if it is hooked up via the RAID controller, as it then appeared back in the BIOS where I set it as boot drive and it was back working.

It appears that the problem may be related to my e-mu 1616 which I recently installed, as the OS declared that it was missing when I booted.

So in summary, the answer to my problem was to create a new array, but NOT initialise the array and allocate the drive to it.

Thanks for the hair splitting.

Iain