Need Help with a Dieing RAID Partition...

[Scorpion]

UPDATE: Read post below.

Actually, it may already be dead. But I really need your help guys.

I had my computer off for one day, booted it back up, and windows can't find the drive. The driver for the FastTrak66 shows that the device is there and working correctly.

So I'm thinking that there must be a problem with one of the drives. BUt that's weird that it was working just the other day, and it somehow died when I turned the computer back on.

Well, another problem is, usually the Promise BIOS displays before the OS loads and it shows the status of the Array.

Unfortunatly, this hasn't worked since I moved basically all the same peripherals over to my new Abit KT7-RAID board. It never shows the BIOS and just boots right up into Windows 2000. This wasn't ever an issue before, but it surely is now.

I need to read if the status is OK or Critical. And once I get in the BIOS it should tell me which drive is the problem. Unfortunatly, since it never shows the screen, I can't CTRL-F into the FastTrak66 BIOS.

So here's my question. Does anyone know what I should do? Is it my motherboard that is causing the BIOS screen not to show? Or is it that I also put an Adaptec SCSI card in the machine and I'm booting my main partition from a SCSI drive. It sees the FastTrak66 as a SCSI device in the BIOS I assume.

DO I need to pull out the SCSI card and try bootin it up just to see?

A lot of Critical stuff was on that drive. I know... really dumb right? It was just on RAID 0, spanning 4 drives. But they've NEVER acted up.

Anyone know another way to get into the BIOS? Or a way I can fix this?

Also, is it possible to move the cables over to my Onboard Hi-Point RAID controller, and read the drive without destroying or harming the partition that's already on it? I don't know if the Hi-Point will recognize the Promise array or not... and I don't want to take too many chances at losing what's on there.

Does anyone know how expensive it is, or if it's even possible to do Data Recover on the bad drive and stick it back in the Array?

Thanks for any help you can give me guys.

Matt

 

[dowxp]

it should display the raid bios. it has too.. thats where it initializes the raid drive. im pretty sure the array is fine. im not exactly sure what went wrong.. could u move the array to a differnt computer and see if it works fine? perhaps the bios settings for boot scsi device is turned off. not sure at all..

goodluck

 

[Scorpion]

It should display the BIOS but it hasn't on this new motherboard. It seems to initialize though. It's just annoying because I can't check it.

I hope the Array is alright. Like I said though, if I were to move it from my Promise to my onboard Hi-Point controller, do you think it would work? What would I need to set up on the high point controller to make it read my Array?

Thanks for the help guys,

Matt

 

[Scorpion]

Update

Got into the BIOS. Says the Array is "Offline". Apprently my Master drive on my 2nd IDE channel is "Free". All the others are still part of the Array. I put the drive in another computer by itself to see if it would detect the drive. It dected it fine.

I then put it back in the RAID setup, and went into the BIOS and tried to manually create another Array. It listed the "Free" drive as a possibility for a new Array.

This leads me to believe that all the data on the drive is still intact, but somehow it has lost it's associate to the Array.

Does anyone know how I can get it back on the Array? I think the drive is OK. I think something happened that caused it to not think it was apart of the array anymore.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

 

[Scorpion]

Bump. ^
Please any help or suggestions?

 

[Scorpion]

Help?

 

[Woodie]

bump for ya.

Be wary of RAID 0 -- high risk!
RAID5 = safe/reliable.

I can't help ya.

--Woodie