Help - Reset BIOS, lost RAID

mnemonix · 31 Aug 2011 at 09:55

I just did something stupid...

My boot drive is actually 2 SSDs in RAID 0.

I reset my BIOS to remove any overclocked settings forgetting this would also unset the RAID settings.

Tried to boot, it obviously fails to load the OS (Windows XP)
I have now set the SATA drives back to RAID in the BIOS but it still won't boot.

At the moment I can't even enter the RAID setup either (ctrl-G at post I think).

Any ideas? Can I get it back? The drives themselves should be untouched.

(Setup is Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P with AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720)

Ta!

mnemonix · 31 Aug 2011 at 10:32

I'm aware of the risks of RAID 0. My data is on another drive, but I'd still prefer to get my boot drive back as is, if possible!

The drives are now set to RAID in the BIOS as I said above.
I'm getting the message 'press ctrl-G to enter RAID setup', but it won't actually go into it.

mnemonix · 31 Aug 2011 at 11:23

The PC was freezing occasionally, no big deal, but I hadn't touched the BIOS or done any overclocking for months. I was being lazy and figured I'd just reset the BIOS to clear out anything left from the last overclock.

No idea why I can't get into the RAID setup, that is odd. Doing it before the prompt causes it to hang, doing it at the prompt does nothing and it carrys on trying to boot. The keyboard is working though.

Seems this is a common occurance. Reseting the BIOS results in one RAID member dropping out of the array - this is what's happened to me. Both disks are working fine. Some folks have managed to get the array back by rebuilding it, but it looks complicated and unless I can get into the RAID setup I don't stand a chance anyway :-(

mnemonix · 31 Aug 2011 at 20:10

The keyboard works. Delete gets me into the BIOS setup.

I'm using the Gigabyte RAID controller. Ctrl-G is not getting me into the RAID setup however. I still haven't found out why.

In the BIOS, everything is now set correctly, however, as I already explained, one of the drives has dropped out of the array, even though there's nothing wrong with it. A quick google shows this often happens when the BIOS is reset, reflashed etc.

I'm going to connect the two drives to another PC and use Runtime's 'RAID reconstructor' to build an image of the drive on to a single disk and see if this will then boot the afflicted machine.