Unexpected RAID issue - help!

[Trajan]

I'm fending off panic and hoping someone here might be able to share advice!

A few months ago put two SSDs in RAID0 to make a boot drive. For my experience level, it was tricky buy I got it to work. In the process, I happened to disconnect a couple of back up drives that I rarely use.

Fast forward to this morning. I was running out of storage on the one extra (non-RAID) drive connected in. I shut my computer down, and hooked up the two extra back up drives. I didn't change anything in the BIOS at all.

When I restarted the computer, I got "BOOTMGR IS MISSING". I restarted and watched the boot sequence. The RAID manager utility that boots along with my bios (Intel Matrix Storage Manager?) showed that my RAID boot drive has status "failed". I don't see any repair option, just options to delete or reset the volume.

Can anyone suggest a fix? Or an explanation of what happened? One of the reasons I'm freaking out a little is that I plugged in the backup drives specifically because its been a few weeks since I did a backup T_T

* I tried unplugging the two drives that I plugged in and which started the problem. Didn't fix anything.
* I don't think this is relevant, but to make one of the connections to the new backup drive, I disconnected a e-SATA port from my case, since I am now maxing out my ports
* My old set up was one storage drive and the two RAID drives, plus an optical drive

Any advice at all is greatly appreciated!!

EDIT: I got it working again! After unplugging the two drives that caused the issue (with no fix) I rebooted again, this time plugging my external SATA connection in too. Now it works. .... wtf? I'd still really really appreciate any help, since I need that port to get my other drives up!

 

[RebateMonger]

Is there a disk connected to your eSATA port (that you'd disconnected)? If there was a disk there and you've now removed it, it's possible that your Boot files got located on that disk when you installed the two SSD disks.

Inside Windows, go to Disk Management and look at the properties of each of your connected disk, checking to see which are listed as "Active" and which are listed as "Boot" and which are listed as "System".

 

[Campy]

This is probably not relevant but anyway. I think i get that error message(or something similar) when the boot order of my HDs is wrong in the BIOS. I need to have the OS drive as #1.

Good luck with your problem.

 

[Trajan]

Thanks guys.

Campy - I was definitely getting the message because my RAID failed to boot, so the computer was trying to boot off the storage drive instead, which doesn't have an OS :/

RebateMonger - that's the weird thing, I've never actually used that eSata port before!

I can't figure out any reason why unplugging that port (which is built into my case) would cause my RAID boot drive to not load 🙁

 

[mv2devnull]

RebateMonger - that's the weird thing, I've never actually used that eSata port before!

I can't figure out any reason why unplugging that port (which is built into my case) would cause my RAID boot drive to not load 🙁

That is indeed baffling.

Otherwise, device enumeration is the keyword. During boot, the BIOS enumerates the drives. Then it loads a bootloader from the MBR of the "first" drive (unless you have changed the "boot order" BIOS setting).

Bootloader enumerates the drives too. It has been told to load an OS from partition M of drive N. With Windows this usually tends to be the first partition of the first drive.

Finally, the OS enumerates the drives. Microsoft does actually document how various versions of Windows do that. (It is possible to have the OS on volume other than "C:".)

Connecting additional drives most likely did change one or more of these enumerations. Perhaps they were SATA ports 0 and 1, and when there is nothing, the port 2 has the "first" drive. Reconnect, and port 2 is suddenly the "third" device.


But a port that has no device connected to it should be just as empty with or without extension cable. Strange.


I would shuffle the connections until the stripe is on the first two ports.

PS. I'm always very scared about stripe for its anti-redundancy.

 

[FishAk]

I'm using an ASUS Rampage II Gene, and for some reason, out of the blue, all, or some of my USB disks show up in the boot list, and my primary drive gets pushed down someplace. Sometimes it takes a couple starts, and trips to BIOS to get it all straightened out if I want to keep the non boot drives connected. I know f no solution to this annoyance.

 

[Campy]

That sounds really annoying FishAk. I think usb stuff is supposed to be listed as boot media but on my board it always gets added to the bottom of the list so its never an issue.