[gordolindsay]

Hi Everyone, here's the situation:

I have a self built computer with an IDE drive as my main drive (yes it's old and slow, I know) and two SATA drives set up in a RAID 0.

The IDE has the operating system on it and the RAID has all my music on it.

I came back from vacation, plugged my computer in, turned it on, it went throught the boot process but when the windows logo is supposed to come on, nothing happened and just sat there with a black screen.

Tried many things to try to determine the problem, but to make a long story short, I probably have a bad drive (the IDE).

Since I didn't know what the problem was at first I tried several different things. One article said to take the battery out of the motherboard to reset the cmos memory or something. But it reset my bios also and so my raid array didn't show up anymore when I tried booting.

I didn't change anything else in the bios or on those drives. Is there anyway to rebuild the array and save what's on there? I obviously need a new drive for the operating system, but I would have to install the raid drivers and all that stuff.

But if I'm able to rebuild it, what order do I do things in? Can I unplug the drives and plug them in to a new computer and still be able to save things? Is any of this possible or am I dreaming?

Thanks a bunch!!!

 

[jsaliga]

Ah, but you did make a change to the BIOS. By resetting the CMOS all of your BIOS settings were very likely returned to their factory defaults. And on most motherboards the SATA RAID function is disabled by default. So long as you have not done anything to the disks themselves, you should be able to enter your BIOS setup utility, enable the SATA RAID function on your chipset, and then save your settings and reboot.

The RAID should then show up during the POST.

--Jerome

 

[Wodgy]

[snip - I misread which of your drives went bad]

 

[EnOYiN]

Why would you go RAID 0 on your music in the first place? I would much rather have a RAID 1 for music since you don't really need the extra bandwidth RAID 0 has to offer. (in my opinion)

Anyways, I think your array can be rebuild just fine if your drives are alright by turning on RAID in your BIOS like Jerome described.

 

[gordolindsay]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EnOYiN /img/forum/go_quote.gif Why would you go RAID 0 on your music in the first place? I would much rather have a RAID 1 for music since you don't really need the extra bandwidth RAID 0 has to offer. (in my opinion) Anyways, I think your array can be rebuild just fine if your drives are alright by turning on RAID in your BIOS like Jerome described.

The only reason I went raid was because I had two 500 GB hard drives and my music takes up about 800 GB so I decided to set up raid so I could fit everything together on "1" drive. Obviously not the smartest thing to do, but it's what I could do with what I had.

If I can rebuild it, I will and keep it like that. But if I loose everything I might just set them up as two separate drives and just deal with it instead of having to worry about it.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions so far. I am about to order another drive, so I hopefully can get this show moving...

 

[smrtby123]

If nothing is wrong with either SATA drive then your RAID stack should be fine. The raid config is handled through the bios, windows just needs the drivers to be able to access the drives and write to them. You probably just have to renenable RAID on the SATA channels that you have the 2 drives attached to. Re-enable RAID and when you boot the computer there should be a RAID setup portion of the bios that should see the RAID stack whether there is an IDE or not, otherwise you may have a bigger problem.

I would take anything that is not expendable off of your RAID 0 stack. There is no saving a 0 array in the event of a drive failure. I run 2x 80gb raid 0 but the only things that are one there are games that are easily replaced.

 

[analogbox]

If your RAID drives and motherboard are ok then your RAID config should be fine, I believe. However, if you're interested in keeping your data longer and safer, I highly suggest you invest in a separate RAID controller and move everything the the new RAID 1 config. Sooner or later, your motherboard will fail, and if you don't find the motherboard that have the same controller, you would have to rebuild the array which means you'll lose all the data that in the drives. However, if a RAID controller fails, it's much much easier to replace it and you won't have to worry about rebuilding the array.

 

[gordolindsay]

Thanks for all the suggestions so far! I ordered a new hard drive the other night so hopefully it will be here in the next couple days.

Then off to work we go...

 

[smrtby123]

You should be able to check the raid array without having a new main hdd installed. Just start the computer and go into the bios, and enable RAID on the SATA channels, and change all the other settings you did originally when you installed the RAID in the first place. Restart and then go into the RAID utility for the mobo, and it should see the drives. You won't have anything to boot into, but at least you can see if the stack is ok. If you are really anxious about making sure everything is there, you can get a ubuntu live cd from someone and it can boot into ubuntu without installing anything, and you should be able to check that everything is working.

BTW I hope you didn't buy a new IDE drive if you have open SATA channels

 

[Juaquin]

Some mobos are extremely finicky with their built-in RAID 0 support. I used to run one and anytime power was cut it would forget there was an array. Unless you have a big backup drive or don't mind losing your files on the RAID, do not use RAID 0. If anything, buy 3 (or more) drives and put them in RAID5. Each drive stores 2/3 (ratio depends on number of drives) actual data and 1/3 backup data, so you maintain data parity while increasing performance - the best of RAID 0 and 1 combined.

 

[smrtby123]

RAID 5 is not really that great for a consumer setup. Even raid 0 doesn't give you a crazy amount of speed increase. I wouldn't count on a raid setup to hold sensitive data, you would probably be better off with a regular backup system from now on.

 

[grawk]

If I'm reading your post correctly, your data is gone. If the drive is dead, there's nothing you can do at this point to get it back short of sending it off for data recovery, and spending a lot of money. RAID0 is only for data that is 100% replaceable. It makes it an order of magnitude more likely you'll lose it than keeping everything on the 2 disks separately, because if either disk dies, both disks are useless.

Ok, as was pointed out below, I missed a key point. You should be able to just replace the system disk, reinstall, and go. But RAID0 is still a poor choice unless you have a way to get the music back.

 

[jsaliga]

You are not reading his original post correctly and his RAID0 is recoverable so long as he has not done anything to the member disks themselves.

He lost his system disk...NOT HIS RAID. Please read the thread carefully.

--Jerome

 

[grawk]

nice tone.

Anyway, I updated my post. Doesn't change that RAID0 is a terrible choice.

 

[jsaliga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by grawk /img/forum/go_quote.gif nice tone.

There was no "tone" implied in my post, as you are suggesting. That is something you inferred. All I asked was that people read carefully the original post before they scare the OP into thinking his data is toast. And that is a reasonable request whether or not you happen to agree with it. I know I would be plenty pissed if I followed the advice of someone on a forum and it later turned out to be wrong and I threw out data that was recoverable. I personally wouldn't do that anyway, as it is always worth some effort to recover data even if it appears hopeless.

I agree with you on whether RAID0 is a wise choice. It all depends on why it was implemented and whether or not the OP doesn't mind restoring from a backup if the RAID fails. If performance is the chief consideration then RAID0 may be an appropriate choice. That is a subject that I had no desire to explore with the OP, I just wanted to reassure him that he can recover his RAID0 as long as he did not tamper with the data structures on the individual members of the stripe set.

--Jerome