LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 1:30 pm Post subject: Hey dood, where's my drives?!

That's what I'd like to know in a nutshell

After installing a Plextor DVD+RW on my system, my RAID1 has disappeared in windows, but is deteched on startup. Checked connections, power, removed the plextor drive, widnows jsut will not reconize it's existance.

When I go into the RAID menu, it's telling me that one drive is an invalid RAID drive, the other is reserved.

So I guess I have two questions; one ismy data gone for good, and two can this be fixed? I'm hoping it's jsut an easy fix that doesn't involve me losing my data, as if that happens I'm up shit creek without a paddle and then some. Sad

Board is an ASUS A8N-sli premium if that helps at all. RAID is using the SLI chipset (not the nvraid that comes on it.)

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:53 pm Post subject:

I dunno how your hardware raid works... but if the partitions somehow got out of sync and the boot sectors were borked on one... testdisk might be able to restore the correct partition data and get everything rolling again. It's the program that got a friend's windows partitions to have the correct version description to work properly (and that was ALL that was wrong with the system... stupid windows!) Took all of 5 minutes to fix.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

there are warnings all over the place in that program (as should be with any software that modifies the partition tables)... so definitely be sure that what you're doing is what you want to do. like if something should be ntfs and shows up as something else... then yeah... change it back to ntfs... etc etc.

hope it works.

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:03 pm Post subject:

thanks although it doesn't look liek it's the ticket. once they get past the boot sequence and into the OS is when they disappear. That tool doesnt' even see them at all.

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 8:40 am Post subject:

Well replacing the drive at least gets rid of the invalid drive option. Although why is the second drive coming up at reserved?

Remind me never to use onbard raid again. The support for these products sucks ass.

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 10:01 am Post subject:

For those in a similair situation, putting the connector to the nvraid series of connectors resolved the issue.

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject:

right... raid solution... plug into raid ports...

I hate it when the simple solution is the most elusive

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 6:10 pm Post subject:

Slymer wrote:
right... raid solution... plug into raid ports...

I hate it when the simple solution is the most elusive

normally I'd agree, but this board has two groups of RAID ports. Why it didn't.....I have no idea (and dont' really mind as I put this system up for sale.)