System info: Old(ish) Athlon PC, Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, Windows XP SP3. 2*2 disk drives arranged in 2 disks, both in Raid 1 (mirroring) configuration. The Raid array has malfunctioned a couple of times over 5 years, but Nvidia Raid Manager has been able to repair it. Now, the PC reported on startup that "Array degraded". Raid setup sees only one of the disks in the malfunctioning array, and Windows Device Manager doesn't see anything but the functioning array that fortunately is the boot disk. I've deconstructed the malfunctioning array in raid setup. Now, my question is how to go about in getting the data back from the degraded array? I'm assuming at least one disk is working and should contain all my data. At least I hope so, because that was the point of spending twice the money for the same amount of disk space in the first place... Funnily enough, the degraded pair of disks is the newer one, a 2-year-old pair of Seagate 1TB disks which are still under warranty. Is there any way to find out if the problem is a malfunctioning disk drive or something else, and which of the dives is dead? I've now also unconnected them both because having even one plugged in stopped the Windows startup for about 10 minutes in both normal and safemode. I'd be very grateful for any suggestions! Finding a repair shop that understands anything about raid disks seems to be difficult. TN
If you let nvidia manager try to fix the problem, it is anyone's guess what it did to your data. Usually you can just plug the drives in like regular drives and you would get everything back...but nvidia may have done something stupid that will force you to do data recovery. You may not be able to use them with the onboard ports as long as RAID is enabled...not sure if that board lets you select what ports are RAID and what ports are regular, or if it is just all-on/all-off.
Thank you for all the replies! In the end, I got some help from a colleague. One of the disks had died completely, it didn't respond to any kind of queries, while the other one seemed to be easily accessible. I guess I should have tried to plug the cables into a different SATA port, because from the original location neither of those disks showed up anywhere (including the BIOS raid manager where I could have removed the array). Well, I've improved my back-up procedures since. I wonder what's going to fail next...
I've taken disks out of my RAID-5 array on purpose just to make sure i can put a backup in and rebuild. If its just a hard drive that fails, its easy to replace. If the RAID manager (hardware/software) fails, its harder to get data back.
RAID-5 is great...if it is hardware raid. That onboard crap by nVidia, Intel, etc are downright dangerous.
I just had a similar issue. I have drives set up in a Raid-5 array. Windows was acting flaky, but more than usual. I did a quick reboot & got a message that there was a error on drive one & that the array was degraded. Unable to get Windows to start in a reasonable amount of time (like today), I restarted and went into the CMOS(F10) array software. I carefully removed drive 1 from the array. After testing the drive in another PC, I connected the drive to port 3, and went back to CMOS to add he drive back to the array. It is rebuilding now. Have yet to determine why, but I'm no overly impressed with NVidia Raid software.
I just had a similar issue. I have drives set up in a Raid-5 array. Windows was acting flaky, but more than usual. I did a quick reboot & got a message that there was a error on drive one & that the array was degraded. Unable to get Windows to start in a reasonable amount of time (like today), I restarted and went into the CMOS(F10) array software. I carefully removed drive 1 from the array. After testing the drive in another PC, I connected the drive to port 3, and went back to CMOS to add he drive back to the array. It is rebuilding now. Have yet to determine why, but I'm no overly impressed with NVidia Raid software.
