If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Need help with SATA RAID 1 failure on A7N8X Delux
My system "had" two Seagate 80mb SATA drives set-up in a RAID 1
(mirror) configuration on an ASUS A7N8X Delux motherboard, using the on-board Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID controller. Several weeks ago my system crashed and I was unable to boot or otherwise access my disk drives. I did not have everything backed up, because I stupidly thought the mirror would protect against a disk failure. I have a years worth of digital photos on the computer and if I can't get them back then my wife will probably never let me spend another cent on computer hardware and other things. I'll basically be in hell for the rest of my life. One more thing, I reside in a small and slightly isolated country and I am the only one I know with SATA hard disks. This is what has happened to date. 1. The disk was formatted in NTFS with three partitions; the lost data is not on the partition with the operating system. 2. The RAID array has been working for about 12 months, albeit with some problems. 3. On three occasions the PC would not boot. I would open the box and disconnect one of the RAID drives. The machine would then boot. I would shut down and reconnect the disconnected drive. The computer would now boot with both drives and the Primary drive would be rebuilt. I take it I had an intermittent problem with the Primary drive. 4. Late one night a few weeks ago I noticed Windows XP had frozen. Before going to bed I used the Power on/off switch to shut down. Next morning the PC would not boot and my trick of disconnecting one of the drives did not work. The PC was reporting Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter. 5. The RAID utility screen was reporting Set0 Invalid RAID drive. 6. I tried to recover using the Windows CD, using F6 and S, inserting floppy with drivers, etc. However, after loading drivers Windows reports that no hard drive is available. 7. Use of DOS boot disks failed because the RAID drivers could not be installed and the hard drive is therefore never visible. 8. I spent several days surfing forums and trying everything possible to have the system recognize the disks without using the RAID utility to delete the RAID array and start from scratch, presumably losing all data in the process (not much help from the manuals on what happens when a RAID array is deleted – for example, does mirroring stop and each disk convert to stand alone hard disk?). 9. There are four options in the RAID utility: Create RAID set (would kill all data?) Delete RAID set (I don't dare) Rebuild RAID set (cannot, invalid RAID drive) Resolve conflicts (there are no conflicts to resolve) 10. By this time my kids are driving me crazy being on school holidays and fighting over the remaining PC so I decided to buy a new IDE hard drive and reinstall Windows onto it while I troubleshot my SATA problem. 11. This is where I made a big mistake. When removing the disk drives to install the new IDE drive, and reconnecting them on the bench, I accidentally shorted out the Primary RAID drive. How do I know it is shorted? When the drive is connected the PC will not power on. I did not tell my wife about this. I am still assuring her the baby pictures are safe. I had been telling her I had two drives from which to try for a recovery. So now I must recover data from only a single SATA drive, once part of a RAID 1 mirror! 12. I was hoping that with Windows XP installed on the IDE drive with the SATA RAID drivers, the remaining RAID drive would be visible. No such luck. 13. I sent an on-line message seeking guidance from Silicon Image tech support and received no reply. After searching the Web for a solution these last few weeks, I am still uncertain of the following: a) How is a single SATA drive connected to the ASUS A7N8X? Is it to be configured as RAID 0 striped array? There is no help in the manual on this. b) What happens when a RAID array is deleted, is all data lost? I am hoping that if I delete the array then the disk would be seen by Windows and I can at the least recover the data in the secondary partitions. On the other hand, this option may not even work since the utility reports Invalid RAID drive. c) Will all data be lost forever if I Create a new RAID array using a single disk? d) What about the security of the NTFS file system, will I be able to see my files if I do recover the disk and can see it after booting on the IDE disk? e) Can the data be recovered and NTFS defeated with disk recovery software? How much would this cost from a professional Company. f) It did occur to me that the problem with my RAID drives was a corrupt BIOS and I have been thinking of flashing the latest BIOS, which is stated to have resolved some SATA bugs. I've never flashed before and some advice on the net is to do this only if essential. The advice if a problem occurs is to seek professional help. Where I live there is no tech support in this respect and so I have been loath to flash the new Bios. Should I do it and what is the chance I will run into an unrecoverable problem? g) What to do with the shorted out RAID drive? Can it be fixed or should I bin it? h) Can anyone offer any an alternate way to recover the data and save me from a life of everlasting hell as I'll constantly be reminded that my $2000 home built PC lost the family snapshots? I very much appreciate everyone's time in reading through my problem and all advice will be very gratefully received. |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
|
#4
|
|||
|
|||
|
#5
|
|||
|
|||
I do not know all your answers, but I will try.
a) How is a single SATA drive connected to the ASUS A7N8X? Is it to be configured as RAID 0 striped array? There is no help in the manual on this. It can be done, I am doing it at the moment (two SATA without raid). The question is more along the lines of getting the SATA controller to use the drive as a single drive. In a ideal implemntation of RAID mirroring. each drive should be possible to be removed and run by itself. The problem arrises if the controller implements the mirror in it's own fashion. It was done by not creating any RAID arrays, I just ignored the option. b) What happens when a RAID array is deleted, is all data lost? I am hoping that if I delete the array then the disk would be seen by Windows and I can at the least recover the data in the secondary partitions. On the other hand, this option may not even work since the utility reports Invalid RAID drive. Deleting the RAID array depends on how it was created ie: is it usable when not on the sata controller. The option may work but it depends on which drive the utility is refering to. c) Will all data be lost forever if I Create a new RAID array using a single disk? can not be done. The raid controller will say can not create raid without two disks (or something to that effect) d) What about the security of the NTFS file system, will I be able to see my files if I do recover the disk and can see it after booting on the IDE disk? I have not had any problems with the NTFS file system. Only time I did I was testing a few otions out, one being to encrypt the data. It was lost that time so I do not use it. If it is just a plain NTFS partition, there should be no problems reading the drive. I had once though that having the wrong / different Admin password might stop me accessing a drive, but it did not happen. e) Can the data be recovered and NTFS defeated with disk recovery software? How much would this cost from a professional Company. Cost of a professional company, very high. Exact cost I do not realy want to know. secondaly, if a recovery software could get around NTFS's security, there is a lot of people that would not be very happy. Just hope you sis not have the security enabled as you will need more help that I can give. just a note for next time, if you do not need the NTFS, format your drives with fat32. A lot easier to recover problems from. (Use to be, not idea if the recovery tools for NTFS have caught up). f) It did occur to me that the problem with my RAID drives was a corrupt BIOS and I have been thinking of flashing the latest BIOS, which is stated to have resolved some SATA bugs. I've never flashed before and some advice on the net is to do this only if essential. The advice if a problem occurs is to seek professional help. Where I live there is no tech support in this respect and so I have been loath to flash the new Bios. Should I do it and what is the chance I will run into an unrecoverable problem? I would hold off doing that for now, get the data back first. g) What to do with the shorted out RAID drive? Can it be fixed or should I bin it? depends on the problem. If you damaged the circuit board, getting a replacement might work. If the motor was samaged, it is a paper weight as I do not know of any way to replace them without paying a lot of money. at a guess i would say that you could by a few new drives for the cost) overall. it might be easiest and quickest to bin it. Best wait until your current problem, is fixed first. h) Can anyone offer any an alternate way to recover the data and save me from a life of everlasting hell as I'll constantly be reminded that my $2000 home built PC lost the family snapshots? OK, now on to what I would do in your shoes (besides get some flowers for the other half). two ways I see this working. It assumes that the remaining drive is good 1) - get a second replacement drive for the one that died and connect it up. THe controller should copy the good drive onto the new drive and all should be well. If the wrong one is imaged (ie the newer drive) onto the old drive, the information will be lost for good) 2) - disconnect both SATA drives from the controller and start the computer. When you get to the configuring of the sata controller, disable the raid array / delete it. Do this with the drive disconnected incase there is some information it tries to write to the hdd (or tries to format them, I am only guessing what it will do). Then turn off the computer, attach the working drive and boot again. do not acess the controller (as it should not be needed). If it asks to do anything to the drive, click no or turn the power off (so nothing is done to the drive). if it works, you should get into windows and see the drive. If not, you will have to try option 1 the best plan would be to plug the drive into someone else's sata controller and get the data. Hope this helps, and next time, back the stuff up. A |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
First of all, may I thank everyone for responding and please keep the
ideas coming. I've tried a few of the suggestions without success and here are my comments: Andrew, "1) - get a second replacement drive for the one that died and connect it up. THe controller should copy the good drive onto the new drive and all should be well. If the wrong one is imaged (ie the newer drive) onto the old drive, the information will be lost for good" I thought of this but I am not to keen to invest in more SATA drives when the chance of success is low. Consider, if the mirror drive is still fully intact and can be imaged to a new drive then why can't I boot from the drive now stand alone. "2) - disconnect both SATA drives from the controller and start the computer. When you get to the configuring of the sata controller, disable the raid array / delete it. Do this with the drive disconnected incase there is some information it tries to write to the hdd (or tries to format them, I am only guessing what it will do). Then turn off the computer, attach the working drive and boot again. do not acess the controller (as it should not be needed). If it asks to do anything to the drive, click no or turn the power off (so nothing is done to the drive). if it works, you should get into windows and see the drive. If not, you will have to try option 1" Worth trying, assumes RAID info is written into the BIOS and not just onto the drive. However, when I tried it the result was that the RAID utility could not be accessed, i.e. with no drives attached. the best plan would be to plug the drive into someone else's sata controller and get the data. This comes back to the question of whether a single SATA drive can be configured on the A7N8X because if it can then I should be able to plug the drive in and view it as well as I could on any other machine. Paul, I downloaded the Syba driver but could not get it to work with my onboard SATA raid controller, i.e. shown as not enabled in the device drivers dialogue screen "Another way to attack the problem, would be to buy a separate SATA controller card that can operate in non-RAID mode and put the remaining good drive on it. That is, if the syba driver above doesn't work for you." Might work but again why doesn't the SATA controller on-board work with a stand alone drive? To round this off with yet more questions. The solution to this would seem to be to understand more of how RAID works. It is not well known. I want to know if the RAID instructions are located in the hardware/BIOS or whether information is written to the disk itself. If on the disk then it is possible my problem is caused by these instructions being corrupted. If you think about it, some RAID information must be written to disk because if the instructions were on the MB and CMOS was reset there would be no flag to tell the controller if the disks were a RAID 0 or 1, stripe size, etc. So the controller cannot find the information it needs and somehow consequently Windows is not able to see the disks. So what I want to know is how to delete or re-write the RAID instructions to the disk without deleting all my data. I also want to know for sure how a single SATA HD is configured on the A7N8X. BTW, I am very grateful for every ones advice on maintaining a back-up. You would think after many years of tinkering with PCs I would know this by now. Actually, I had all my normal data backed up on another networked PC but was running out of space for the family pics, the space taken by which was expanding at a great rate. I knew I should write them to a CD but kept putting it off. I was thinking to myself, no worries, it can wait a few weeks or months. I have RAID1! Cheers and thanks again. |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
Hi,
Have you considered using someting like Knoppix Live CD or MandrakeMove. These are Linux OS CDs that can run the OS from the CD and read NTFS and can burn to CD to recover the pixs. I have done a recovery using Knoppix from a FAT32 partition but not RAID. I can´t test it as I am in here because my RAID0 with 2 WD 80GB crashed, looks like it has killed the HDDs. Arj *************************************** (Cameron) wrote in message . com... My system "had" two Seagate 80mb SATA drives set-up in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration on an ASUS A7N8X Delux motherboard, using the on-board Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID controller. Several weeks ago my system crashed and I was unable to boot or otherwise access my disk drives. I did not have everything backed up, because I stupidly |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
|
#9
|
|||
|
|||
(Arj) wrote in message . com...
Hi, Have you considered using someting like Knoppix Live CD or MandrakeMove. These are Linux OS CDs that can run the OS from the CD and read NTFS and can burn to CD to recover the pixs. I have done a recovery using Knoppix from a FAT32 partition but not RAID. I can´t test it as I am in here because my RAID0 with 2 WD 80GB crashed, looks like it has killed the HDDs. Arj *************************************** (Cameron) wrote in message . com... My system "had" two Seagate 80mb SATA drives set-up in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration on an ASUS A7N8X Delux motherboard, using the on-board Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID controller. Several weeks ago my system crashed and I was unable to boot or otherwise access my disk drives. I did not have everything backed up, because I stupidly Chris, First thing I did was to try connecting the drive stand alone. The RAID utility can see it but Windows XP will not see it, even if a fresh installation is conducted using F6,S, etc Windows cannot find any hard disks attached. I may buy another SATA drive and try to setup the array again, as a last resort. The thing is I don't think the Primary drive was broken before I shorted it out and if everything else was okay it should have rebuilt itself to start with. Thanks for your advice man. Arj, I haven't tried the Linux CD's but I have used the Windows CD several times and have also tried a Windows install with the SATA drivers onto an IDE drive. Windows could only see the IDE drive. So, I doubt the Linux CDs will see the drive either but could be worth a try if the SATA drivers for Linux are all powerful and can see the disk where the Windows drivers coluldn't. Thanks for your help. |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
I've had a similar problem but from another angle. I was running a
A7N8X Deluxe board with a single SATA drive (couldn't afford to get two at the time of purchase) and was using that as my only drive. I never had to configure any raid set to get it working - just plugged it in and gave windows the drivers during the install - no problem. The problem I had is that after 12 months of use (don't things always fail after the guarantee period!) Windows then started to blue screen and moaned about NTFS.SYS and wouldn't boot. I tried bunging in an old ATA drive, installing XP and then booting from that and try to use the SATA drive as a slave but XP moaned about that too. In the end, I resorted to just having the single SATA drive plugged in and then booting from a KNOPPIX (Linux) bootable CD. KNOPPIX supports the READING of NTFS but won't ever write to the disk so the risk of corruption doesn't exist. KNOPPIX recognised the SATA disk without any problems and mounted it. I could then browse the disk at my hearts content. It's also got CD/DVD burning software so I just burnt the entire HD to loads of DVD's - instant backup (which I should have done ages ago). I've now coughed-up and bought 2HDs (Seagate 120Gb) which I've used to create a mirrored set. Haven't had any problems so far (touch wood). Needless to say, I'm now looking quite hard at disk/partition management and backup software. Partition Magic got ruled out quite early on as it doesn't support RAID sets. Now looking at Ghost and Drive Image 7. |
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Asus A7N8X and RAID 1 on Fedora Core 1? | BrianP | Asus Motherboards | 1 | June 8th 04 01:29 AM |
How to set up RAID 0+1 on P4C800E-DLX MB -using 4 SATA HDD's & 2 ATA133 HHD? | Data Wing | Asus Motherboards | 2 | June 5th 04 03:47 PM |
Intel 875 Mobo and RAID. Is this rightso far? | K G Wood | Homebuilt PC's | 7 | April 19th 04 06:17 AM |
DAW & Windows XP RAID Tips, ProTools error -9086 | Giganews | Asus Motherboards | 0 | October 24th 03 06:45 AM |
XPOST - asus a7n8x deluxe SATA & SATA RAID! | \(\) |V| 3 G A | General | 1 | September 26th 03 06:02 PM |