HELP!! Added Drive to Array and Now Array not Bootable

dazman · 30 Jan 2010 at 18:25

Today I added another 500GB samsung drive to my existing 4 drive array. After I did this the array is showing as not bootable in BIOS and I cannot figure out why.

All of my partitions, volume names, data and operating systems are there but I cannot even select the array as one of the boot devices and the bios raid manager says it is not bootable. I can find no option to change it to bootable in BIOS or in Intol Storage manager. Intel storage manager says it is not a system disk also.

The two bootable partitions still show as bootable in the partition tables "07 80". I am using a Gigabyte P45-DS3R. I have done this before to add a drive from 3 to 4 with no problems. Does anyone have any ideas? Where does the BIOS pick up the info to determine if the array is bootable? Are there any utilities that will let me reover from this? If I knew where it was picking up this info perhaps I could edit it to make it bootable?

Help and thanx in advance!!!

Daz

rpstewart · 30 Jan 2010 at 22:11

What size is the array now? You're going to run into problems if it's gone over 2Tb of available space.

dazman · 31 Jan 2010 at 04:43

yep that is the problem. anyone know how i can shrink the array even though it is already allocated? ie it is now 2.5 TB and I want to get it back down to 2tb.

rpstewart · 31 Jan 2010 at 09:48

This is going to be a tricky one - there's no way that I'm aware of to shrink an Intel RAID0 array once it's been created. That means the only way back is to destroy the array and start again which of course means losing the data

If you've got a sufficiently recent backup then that might be an option but if not all might not be lost. After a bit of head scratching I've come up with this - it's only a theory at this point but it might just work.

1) Install a fresh copy of Vista or Win 7 on another HDD. If that let's you see the array then great, grab what you need off it and start over. If it still can't see it move on..

2) If the array has gone over 2Tb then converting it to a GPT volume (rather than the MBR format it was) should make it accessible. According to Microsoft you can only do that on a blank drive but I did manage to find a tool called GPT fdisk which claims to be able to do it non destructively.

3) Hopefully the array is now visible to the new OS install so backup what you need as normal.