So, my HTPC has been acting up lately (occasional lockups, and a BSOD the other day). First I thought it was the sound drivers (since the BSOD was for that driver) -- but reinstalling them didn't seem to help. It didn't seem to be the CPU or RAM, since I could run Prime95 for 12+ hours without a problem, but it would randomly lock up every 4-5 days running BeyondTV. I know the power sucks in my apartment, and the PSU in this system was older (and was in there when the previous motherboard blew up), so I decided I'd swap out the PSU (rather than the MB, which I'd have to RMA) and see if it helped.
During the course of this, I ended up moving my PCI RAID card (an LSI Logic MegaRaid SATA 150-4) to a different PCI slot. I was also trying to figure out what was causing this annoying buzzing sound in my system (turns out it's the 4 drives in the HD cage making the case vibrate; that's a whole different problem). In diagnosing that, I powered it up a couple of times with some of the drives unplugged -- the controller seemed to be fine, and its BIOS screen said some of the drives were disabled. Eventually, I plugged everything back in and powered up.
The RAID controller came up with a warning saying that there was a configuration mismatch between the array information on the drives and the array information in the NVRAM of the controller, and wouldn't let me boot (I could only get into the BIOS of the card). Uh-oh. I'm 99% sure the drives are fine (since the array was intact when I powered down), but that's not good.
I found a couple of KB articles on LSI's website, and tried what they suggested (one suggested just checking and saving the array status from the card's BIOS, and the other suggested turning on the "Force Boot" BIOS option to force a rebuild from disk, which was already on, but I tried turning it off and back on just in case). No dice; I couldn't boot with the RAID card in there, even though once I got into the BIOS it seemed to have the array correctly listed.
In looking through the (vague) manual and the (even vaguer) BIOS options, it sounded like what I wanted to do was to erase the card's NVRAM, which should then rebuild the array status from the disks. Unfortunately, clearing the NVRAM has now left me dead -- the controller says it does not have any logical arrays, although it sees all four physical drives just fine. I haven't done anything to the disks, so I'm sure the data is in there *somewhere*, if I can just convince the controller that the array actually exists. There doesn't seem to be a "get the array data from the disks" option in the BIOS (at least the version I have).
There's nothing crucial on there (other than a bunch of recorded TV shows I haven't watched yet), so it's not like my life depends on it. But I don't want to reformat the array if I can get the data back. LSI phone support is only M-F, and I already sent them off an email, but I was hoping maybe someone here had dealt with this sort of thing before on an LSI controller. Any advice would be appreciated.
Edit: Forgot to mention it was a RAID5 array, with the 4 160GB disks set up as one big virtual RAID5 volume.
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