Can't see Raid Array on Disk Management

R

RichT

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Oct 4, 2007
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On a Gigabyte GA-P35-DSP I have WinXP Pro installed on a Raptor 74GB, I also have a 640GB Raid 0 array and a 300GB single disk all defined on the SB Intel ICH9R. The BIOS is in RAID mode, the ICH9R iaStor.inf (Raid) drivers were installed when installing XP. The raid was defined and then partitioned into 4 drives (500, 60, 20 and 6 GB) and formatted fine in Windows Disk Management. I want to reserve the JMicron controller as AHCI for eSATA drives.

Everything was fine... until I tried to use my back up software (Norton Save and Restore, NSR - yes I know there's a bunch of people who hate it and Symantec in general... but I happen to like it). NSR could see my OS drive and my backup drive (300GB standalone) but none of the drives on the raid array.

Explorer can still see the Raid drives fine and I can more data to and from them, no problem. Now a few days later, Disk Management no longer sees the Raid array ??? The array status is normal and I've verified it in the Matrix console and no disk errors were found. I've only just finished installing everything (again) to get the raid drivers set up right (at least I thought I had).

Any idea why this is happening and what I can do ? Thanks
 
Could this have anything to do with the MBR (seem to contain disk and partition info) possibly being corrupt on the raid ? I can't seem to find if the MBR is applicable only for the boot disk or for any disk... including raids.

Any ideas ?
 
If they were dynamic disks I could see a big issue with that, but if they're basic then I'm at a loss for your problem.

But no, the MBR is not stored on every disk, only boot disks or even former boot disks, IIRC.
 
Thanks for the reply and info about MBR... I couldn't fine that out after lots of research.

I've progressed a little... after backing up everything:

* I've tested the disks with Sea Tools.. OK
* Removed the array bootingto win, close win, reattach drives, boot.. no impact
* Delete arrays, define arrays - all drives dissappear (no surprise) but since disk manager (DM) doesn't show the disk I was stuck at being able to define array partitions and drives... until...

Booted in Safe Mode. I see the disk in DM. DH doesn't take a minute to display the configuration (which it was in normal mode) and have redefined my partitions and drives.

I now feel confident the drives and array are good... something in windows (software) is not. I'll be doing more investigation into the possibility of bad drivers tonight. Any pointers ?

RT.
 
Been away for a while but back trying to get the array seen in DM....

I did a XP repair re-install last night (full XP-SP2 with the RAID and ACHI drivers but not nLite'd in any other way) with no impact... same issues still :(

Found an INTEL forum that discussed issues relating to having an array on the INTEL ports 0 to 3... so I will try moving the array to ports 4 and 5 tonight.

If that doesn't work, given the Safe Mode result (I see the drive array) I guess I'll remove all peripherals and their drivers and add them back one by one until to see if that works...

All and any ideas on this are still very welcome. Thanks

Rich T.
 
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