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Messed up RAID array
Alright, here's the story. I'm running a RAID 0 array with 2 250GB
SATA hard drives. My RAID card shows up as "Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATALink Controller" in the Windows XP Device Manager. The RAID array uses the NTFS file system. Now, what happened is that for some strange reason, my Windows decided to install a critical security update on its own. When I got back to my computer it had rebooted and the RAID array no longer showed up. I rebooted again and it installed drivers for the RAID card automatically and the RAID array correctly showed up, only it is now seen as unformatted. I've been very careful not to allow any sort of "initialization" or formatting on my drives since this problem started, so all of the data should still be there. My only question is - how to recover it? Thanks a lot. |
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kony wrote in message . ..
On 15 Oct 2004 21:19:30 -0700, (Cyde Weys) wrote: Not sure how to go about this - is there a list of updates that were recently installed? I advise making a restorable backup of the system partition before any windows changes. In your windows folder there should be (providing you've set the folder options to show hidden & operating system files) several hidden folders. They might look something like "$NtUninstallKB841356$" (only an example). Within each should be the uninstall method, perhaps a BAT file, or INF, and these folders can be seen to correspond to the date. Done. 3) Install same driver it used previously. I'm not sure which driver I originally used - all I know is that I setup the RAID array, Windows started up, it detected the drives, automagically installed a suitable driver, and it worked. Is there any way to find out what driver my drives used to use? Well, I may not be too helpful then, I don't use window's drivers, always opting to install latest from chipset manufacturer instead. Hopefully uninstalling the update will help. If not, maybe using the change driver wizard for that device will show both (I don't know)? Yeah, I should have paid more attention when installing my RAID array. I should've inserted the CD that came with the RAID card at least and let it use those drivers :-/ So far I've tried the drivers that came with the card and the default WinXP Unknown Manufacturer - SCSI/RAID Host Controller drivers - neither is recognizing my array as anything other than something in need of formatting. So I used some other driver to install the RAID array - presumably it should still be on my system somewhere? How would I go about locating it? It's not showing up in Update Driver - Install from a specific list or location - Don't search. I will choose the driver to install. Does anyone make some sort of RAID tool that will look at an array, see how it is formatted, and figure out what driver it used accordingly? This is very frustrating. |
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On 16 Oct 2004 12:35:14 -0700, (Cyde Weys)
wrote: Well, I may not be too helpful then, I don't use window's drivers, always opting to install latest from chipset manufacturer instead. Hopefully uninstalling the update will help. If not, maybe using the change driver wizard for that device will show both (I don't know)? Yeah, I should have paid more attention when installing my RAID array. I should've inserted the CD that came with the RAID card at least and let it use those drivers :-/ So far I've tried the drivers that came with the card and the default WinXP Unknown Manufacturer - SCSI/RAID Host Controller drivers - neither is recognizing my array as anything other than something in need of formatting. So I used some other driver to install the RAID array - presumably it should still be on my system somewhere? How would I go about locating it? It's not showing up in Update Driver - Install from a specific list or location - Don't search. I will choose the driver to install. Does anyone make some sort of RAID tool that will look at an array, see how it is formatted, and figure out what driver it used accordingly? This is very frustrating. At this point I'd check the RAID bios to confirm that they're assigned same as previously, just for the heck of it. Then I'd head over to http://www.sysinternals.com where they should have a DOS NTFS driver (read only on free version) and see if the array shows up in DOS... I'm not too familar with their DOS driver but am thinking that removing windows from the equation might reveal if the array is intact at all, as I would've expected a different driver for same controller to still work, that maybe it's windows doing something differently and/or broken but I have no idea what that problem might be. |
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kony wrote in message . ..
At this point I'd check the RAID bios to confirm that they're assigned same as previously, just for the heck of it. Then I'd head over to http://www.sysinternals.com where they should have a DOS NTFS driver (read only on free version) and see if the array shows up in DOS... I'm not too familar with their DOS driver but am thinking that removing windows from the equation might reveal if the array is intact at all, as I would've expected a different driver for same controller to still work, that maybe it's windows doing something differently and/or broken but I have no idea what that problem might be. I don't know what to say ... I pressed F4 to view the RAID bios as it was booting up, didn't change a thing as everything seemed to be in order, and then let Windows boot normally ... and the array was good! All data intact! Thanks so much for all the help, kony. I still have one question though. Now that I have my array up and running, how would I go about backing up my current driver so that it will be much easier in the future to fix things if they go wrong again? |
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On 17 Oct 2004 14:54:22 -0700, (Cyde Weys)
wrote: kony wrote in message . .. At this point I'd check the RAID bios to confirm that they're assigned same as previously, just for the heck of it. Then I'd head over to http://www.sysinternals.com where they should have a DOS NTFS driver (read only on free version) and see if the array shows up in DOS... I'm not too familar with their DOS driver but am thinking that removing windows from the equation might reveal if the array is intact at all, as I would've expected a different driver for same controller to still work, that maybe it's windows doing something differently and/or broken but I have no idea what that problem might be. I don't know what to say ... I pressed F4 to view the RAID bios as it was booting up, didn't change a thing as everything seemed to be in order, and then let Windows boot normally ... and the array was good! All data intact! Thanks so much for all the help, kony. I still have one question though. Now that I have my array up and running, how would I go about backing up my current driver so that it will be much easier in the future to fix things if they go wrong again? Image the OS partition with something like Ghost or Driveimage. Doing so you don't have to depend on windows working, can simply restore prior known good config. Of course the timeliness of the backups count, in some cases it's good to have personal data stores like My Documents, Email, etc, elsewhere instead of on the OS partition. |
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kony wrote in message . ..
Image the OS partition with something like Ghost or Driveimage. Doing so you don't have to depend on windows working, can simply restore prior known good config. Of course the timeliness of the backups count, in some cases it's good to have personal data stores like My Documents, Email, etc, elsewhere instead of on the OS partition. My OS partition is 40GB large (a full hard drive, actually) - would I be imaging it onto multiple DVDRs or something? I could easily store the 40GB OS partition on my 2x250 RAID array, but that kind of defeats the point :-) |
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