Raid array dead?! Advice needed...

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Not sure what has happened on my machine but it looks like my raid array has gone to pot...

When booting I get the following message:

At bios checks it flashes "Problem with raid array: 1"
Then when it tries to boot from th array it says:

Searching for boot record from BBS-0 [FT 378 ARY 1] ... not found

Reboot and select a proper boot device.


It looks like the master boot record on the array is corrupt or somthing which really isnt good. I am assuming at this point I will have to rebuild the array/format/re-install system unless anyone has some ideas?


I was trying to boot the computer with a boot disk up to see if I could access the array...I wouldnt mind geting some data off it if at all possible! Not sure how to go about this though. I have 4 hdd's 2 which are in the raid0 on FAT (i cant remember if that is totally correct) and another 2 that are seperate NTFS sata drives.

Is there a way i can boot form a cd or somthing so i can at least access the data on all these drives? I tried using DSL (Damn Small Linux) from a cd but dont know how to access my hdd's once booted. I though it would mount them for me but I cannot see the drives.
 
The drives don't exist as mountbale filesystems. You need to try to recover the array with the software that came with the mobo or the BIOS raid control software. Until the array is repaired, the data on the individual drives cannot be accessed by anything.
 
Faults in raid 0's are often unrecoverable, because of the way the data is striped between the disks.

However, any drives which were not part of the array should be readable without any special utilities. Just install the drives as normal. Unless something has wiped clean all the partitions.

Even if the partitions are gone, there are programs which are free to download which can be used to locate lost partitions. I even managed to get one of these to restore a raid 0 once, but thats because I had simply 'accidently' erased the partition on the array, but the array itself was not corrupted, so the utility was able to consider the raid0 as just another disk, and locate and restore the partition tables.
 
Ouch. RAID 0
sad.gif
 
you know i had a similar problem last week and i thought that i was gunna lose everything on my raid, so i tried everything to fix it but nothing worked, i then went into the raid software and deleted the array, it then asked me if i wanted to format or just remove the array or something like that, so i was like hmm yeh no format thats cool. The just went to build array and it asked what type (performance) it made it and all worked.. didnt lose anything aswell.

I dunno if this will work for you but for anyone else this could be usefull, so to cut it short im sure you can remove the array without format and then rebuild it. i dunno if this works on a mirror tho..
 
hurrah!

it actually worked :D

I went into the RAID setup and deleted the array but didnt deleted the data. I kept note of the RAID0 specifics such as stripe size so when I created the array again I could use exactly the same settings.
After rebulding the array I coule log on to my OS. What joy, I can access the files and back them up immediately :)

Your information is worth a sticky I think. It could save a lot of heart ache!!

:D
 
heh cool im glad it worked :)

I was thinking today that if you lost all your data because of that and you have a 'mirror' which is meant for security then whats the point in a mirror if you lose all your data when the array fubars!?

And now i know it doesnt :D
 
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