Raid 1 - Mirror Problem

[Rajeev]

Hello,

Well, I found on one of my computers that my Raid 1 array (SATA) stopped working. At the RAID controller boot (ASROCK Dual SATA) it says that one of the drives has malfunctioned, and to replace the HD and rebuild the array.
I also heard RAID 1 continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning? :Q
Now I was wondering if I could disconnect the bad HD, and use the good HD as non-RAID, and use it as a single drive? I thought it would work. It's recognized on RAID boot, and in Device Manager but does not show in Admin Tools/Comp. Management/Disk Management.
Should it work in this way, or do I have to get the RAID array back to working to recover the data.
Thanks for any info!

 

[superunknown98]

There are many threads in this forum alone about this topic, and even more information in general if you search google.

Since you did not tell us exactly what model motherboard you have, and looking up what little you did post, I'm assuming you have a socket 939 AMD board with a Uli chipset. You should be able to use the working drive from the raid 1 aray by itself. You may have to turn raid off in the mothboard bios for it to boot into windows or show up in disk managment. If you are not booting the raid 1 aray, you should still be able to see the working drive by itself in windows and move data somewhere more secure.

 

[Rajeev]

Oh, sorry about that... the drives were in my parents computer (not at my place) and I was testing the two drives in my own computer.

Parents:
Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 - ULi® 1695 chipset (ULi® M1695/ ULi® M1567)
XP SP2 - 32bit
2 x ST3250620AS - Seagate SATA - 250GB

Mine:
MSI K8N-Neo4 - NVIDIA ® nForce4
XP 64bit
Adaptec 29160 - SCSI drives

ASROCK:
Both drives when using Windows XP (Repair option) chkdsk.... it gives the error something like : This drive has unrecoverable problems.

MSI:
I made a mistake in my first post, and the 'good' drive does show up in 'Disk Management' under Disk 7 (which is why I didn't see it) But it's listed as: 232.88 GB - Unallocated?

I guess since the attempt to use just the 'good' drive as non-RAID should've worked, so this drive is bad as well? But it is so badly corrupted to give "unrecoverable problems" in chkdsk?

 

[superunknown98]

Taking a raid 1 aray from one motherboard to another generally does not work unless they use the same chipset. So trying the raid array from the Asrock board in your MSI will not work.

Having the one drive show up in windows is a good sign. It maybe that the ntfs tables are corrupted, giving you the "unallocated" label. At this point you might try mounting the disk in a linux enviroment. Knopix is popular for recovering data. Or you might be able to find software that will recover data, even from a formated drive. I doubt both drives would physically fail at the same time.