Recovery of data from failed AMD Store MI tier

[Tony habergham]

I was just in the innards of my main PC, taking out some memory and an SSD for an upgrade to my sons PC.

All gone swimmingly until I discovered my desktop icons had disappeared. Further investigation shows that this is because my main data drive is now missing.

This was cached disk using an AMD Ryzen 'Store MI' tier - A 500GB HDD linked with a 128GB PCIe SSD. The first generation of the software because I'm only on a Ryzen 1600.

Now, I was fairly complacent about this arrangement because my understanding was that if the tier failed, the data would simply be available on the HDD. I'm rather ****** to find that this is not, in fact, the case and both drives are visible to computer management, but with unallocated space and no partitions. Is there anything to be done?

Digging around on the internet, I've seen a link to a free software utility; 'Recova'. Worth a shot if I've nothing to loose, but I just wondered if there's any way to recover the tier and data.

 

[Tony habergham]

Sure. I removed a 250GB PCIe disk from a spanned disk setup with a 500GB PCIe, that was used for my games/steam storage. Copied off all the data, removed the span, reformatted the 500GB and copied back the data onto it. All OK.

Removed two of my four matched 8GB sticks of Crucial 3200 MHz DDR4. Tried to get the machine booting stably with two 4GB sticks of DDR4 with different timings. Gave up on that after an hour or so after numerous reboots (couldn't get anything to boot over 2400MHz).

The change shouldn't have effected either of the two tier drive disks, which is why I didn't notice the problem until everything was re-installed in my man cave.

 

[Tony habergham]

Current setup is a Ryzen 1600 CPU, MSI X470 Gaming pro Max AM4 motherboard, 2x8GB of 3200MHz DDR4, a 120GB M.2 Sata boot drive, a 500GB M2 PCIe games drive, and 500GB SATA data drive, a 128 GB Cache drive, and a couple of 16GB PCIe data drives that I used for BOINC computing tasks and google cache.

I've just thunk - although the 128GB cache drive still shows up to windows (but unpartitioned) it was mounted in the same twin PCIe card as the removed 250GB. Worth trying to reseat it, I suppose. But cant do it for a while as I'm currently cooking for five.

Edit - Forgot my new MSI GTX 1660 Super that I got from OC the other day.