Nvidia raid 1 rebuild

[superunknown98]

I am having trouble with Nvidia raid and rebuilding an array. One of the drives in my server went bad so I pulled it from the system and disabled the raid 1. Now that I have a new drive I want to enable Raid 1 again but it's not working that well. When I turn Raid on in the bios and plug the new SAT drive in, It tells me no boot disk is found. If I delete the old array and create a new one ( keeping the data) the pc will say there was an error loading the OS.

If I rebuild the array in the raid bios I don't know which drive I'm rebuilding from as it doesn't give clear directions when I choose a drive.

Does anyone have experience with Nvidia raid?

 

[blueeyesm]

This may help you with rebuilding your array:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/image-vp568796.html

 

[superunknown98]

Thanks for the link. I finally got it to work. I wish nvidia would update there manual to include rebuild directions from the raid bios. Basically I went into the raid bios and told it to rebuild the array. In my case the array was already broken and i had to createa new one, but if it isn't all you have to do is view the array, hit (r) for rebuild and highlight the drive you want to copy too. I'm not even sure if the last part about highlighting the drive is nessicary. After it start the rebuild press control-x and reboot into windows. There in the windows version of mediashield, it will show how the array is rebuilding.

It's a good thing i had an extra pc to test with otherwise I could have really messed up my server.

 

[taltamir]

you are not supposed to disable an array when a drive dies, you are supposed to run it as degraded (or ideally, leave the computer off) while getting a new drive to replace the old one and then rebuilding...

Luckily for you raid1 arrays are so resilient.

 

[bamalek]

I have two drives WDC WD7501AALS on channel SATA 1.0 degraded and another WD7501AALS on channel 1.1 that states an error. These drives were bought this month to replace 2 Seagate 750GB that I thought were bad, but are good after checking them out on Seagate's Seatools.

I tried rebuilding the WD 750 gb drives after installing them but the above has occurred. The Raid array was fine when I had Vista Ultimate 32 bit installed, but since installing Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit I have had this problem. I replaced the sata cables too.

I tried rebuilding on the WD's from the Raid Bios, but now have this problem. I do not know if they are working though. I have been able to boot up Windows 7. I have the NVIDIA Control Panel, but the only option on it is the delete array. I do not have the NVIDIA Raid Manager Utility and cannot find in NVIDIA website.

I am a novice at Raid and any help suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Bob

Dell XPS720
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB display adapter
8 GB Ram
Intel Core2 Processor Q6600

 

[positronic]

Nvidia RAID 1 (mirror) Degraded Rebuild in Windows 7

Below tested on my system which has nforce 570 chipset using Windows 7 Home 64 bit. Note - I'm not sure why Nvidia doesn't have a rebuild array option for their Windows utility but the following works for me.

1 Open up Nvidia Control Panel & switch to Advanced Settings if on Standard Settings.
2 On left should have 4 options (View storage configuration, Configure SMART settings, SMART Self-Test, and Delete Array). Click on Delete Array
3 Do not clear the Master Boot Record although it recommends to. I'm assuming they recommend clearing the MBR for those people not wanting to rebuild the array.
4 Click OK to delete and it will immediately start rebuilding the array
5 "View storage configuration" should show highlighted & on the right side percentage completed shows.
6 Rebuild of array could take hours depending on the size of the drives.

Note - process is for Mirrored array only, not striped array.