RAID 1 (mirror) fails on Asus A8N-SLI - SiL3114

[amfriedman]

A cry for help:

I have a RAID 1 (mirror) array which I created from the SiL 3114 bios of this A8N-SLI Premium. The array failed in a way that did not prompt me for a repair. This array is NOT the boot drive. I am running XP professional. I have the latest MB bios. After the failure, when I went into the Silicon Image RAID bios, the failed array's two drives showed up as "Invalid RAID" (or similar error) and "Spare drive". I deleted the array and tried to access each drive individually in XP, a method that has worked for me in the past with my Promise RAID controller when my RAID 1 failed years ago. Unfortunately, when XP finds the drive, it doesn't recognize it as a formatted drive and prompts me to format the drive, which, of cours, I do not do.

There must be some way to access the data on either of these drives. I do not care about recreating the array. I just want to copy the data, which is very important to me, containing many hours of family videos and my wife's data files, amoung other things.

The physical discs seem to be OK.

Has anyone encounted this type of RAID 1 failure before?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Alan

 

[RebateMonger]

UseNet post about somebody with a very similar problem --- lots of suggestions, but no solution.

Obviously, you need to be REALLY careful what you do to these drives. If the data is really valuable, it's probably a good time to call a professional that specializes in data recovery.

If the data isn't quite that important, I'd make a clone of the one "good" drive, using Ghost 2003, and then try data recovery on the clone. If you don't have a backup drive already (and I assume you don't, or you wouldn't be trying to recover your data) you might as well buy one, and do the cloning to it. Later on, put the new drive in an external USB housing and use it to store backups of your data so this doesn't happen again.

Since you've destroyed the RAID array information on the drive (by deleting the array), you'll need to read the drive as a non-RAID drive. The UseNet post suggests installing a Syba driver that changes the Silicon Image controller to non-RAID more, so it can read a non-RAID drive. Who knows? Maybe that'll be able to read your drive.

 

[amfriedman]

Thanks for the link. It drives me crazy that neither of these drives is accessible on their own. That's how it worked with the Promise controller on my last Asus board; if I removed the Raid array, each drive and file structure was quickly recognized. That's why I went with Raid 1.

There has got to be an easy answer for this.

 

[BadThad]

Wow, that REALLY sucks. That's the whole purpose of a RAID1 setup. Did it fail while in windows or on cold restart?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: amfriedman
Thanks for the link. It drives me crazy that neither of these drives is accessible on their own. That's how it worked with the Promise controller on my last Asus board;

Yeah. I can pull one of my HighPoint RocketRAID's IDE drives and pop it onto a standard IDE connector and I can boot from it. But Silicon Image may configure the RAID drives differently.

 

[amfriedman]

Originally posted by: BadThad
Wow, that REALLY sucks. That's the whole purpose of a RAID1 setup. Did it fail while in windows or on cold restart?

It failed in XP. There was an unexplained lock-up and a blank screen. When I pulled up task manager, which took about a minute or so, everything was flaky, so I rebooted. When the Raid bios came up, the two Raid1 drives were not listed and the system would not boot into windows. When I re-booted again, I went into the SiL bios. That's when I got the "invalid raid" error on my Raid1 array. I'm afraid you know the rest.

 

[amfriedman]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: amfriedman
Thanks for the link. It drives me crazy that neither of these drives is accessible on their own. That's how it worked with the Promise controller on my last Asus board;

Yeah. I can pull one of my HighPoint RocketRAID's IDE drives and pop it onto a standard IDE connector and I can boot from it. But Silicon Image may configure the RAID drives differently.

If I knew that an add-in card would permit me to access the drive and its contents, I would do that in a second.

 

[imported_carson]

The logical structure of the array has corrupted. It is not a simple fix. I would suggest you to send your media to professional data recovery company.

JP idata recovery lab charge at resonable price,
http://www.jpidata.com

 

[Green Man]

If you have the software, it is actually a pretty easy recovery.

 

[Green Man]

Alan,

Turn on your PM

 

[amfriedman]

Originally posted by: Green Man
Alan,

Turn on your PM

Done. Sorry, I have not used PM in this forum before.

 

[shaq34]

I know this is a old thread but I hope some people may still be monitoring it.

I have a old A8n-SLI board with onboard raid.
Had two 1.5 Tb Sata drives in mirror state with some very valuable data.

Installed linux and unfortunately corrupted the partiton table.
Going into the RAID bios it does not show any disks raided.
Booting up cannot see any drives.

I have gone into the raid bios and recreated the raid drive.
** Chose N and made sure not to delete data on the disk **
Hence the data should be safe.

When I boot up in ubuntu live disk and go into gpartd I still cannot see the partition. I need to recreate the partion without formatting the drive. But I am very cautious about selecting the partition and say create new partition in case it then formats the drive.

Original partition type was NTFS.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could achieve this?

Or is there another way that people think that I should approach this.

Alot of important family pictures and documents so I do not wish to delete any data on the disk.

Cheers in advance for any help.

 

[shaq34]

I know this is a old thread but I hope some people may still be monitoring it.

I have a old A8n-SLI board with onboard raid.
Had two 1.5 Tb Sata drives in mirror state with some very valuable data.

Installed linux and unfortunately corrupted the partiton table.
Going into the RAID bios it does not show any disks raided.
Booting up cannot see any drives.

I have gone into the raid bios and recreated the raid drive.
** Chose N and made sure not to delete data on the disk **
Hence the data should be safe.

When I boot up in ubuntu live disk and go into gpartd I still cannot see the partition. I need to recreate the partion without formatting the drive. But I am very cautious about selecting the partition and say create new partition in case it then formats the drive.

Original partition type was NTFS.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could achieve this?

Or is there another way that people think that I should approach this.

Alot of important family pictures and documents so I do not wish to delete any data on the disk.

Cheers in advance for any help.