Q: A cry for help:
I have a RAID 1 (mirror) array that I made of the Sil 3114 bios this A8N-SLI Premium. The array is not in a way that I do not prompt for a repair. This array is NOT the boot disk. I use XP professional. I have the latest bios MB. After the failure, when I was in the Silicon Image RAID bios, the array failed two drives appeared as “Invalid RAID” (or similar error) and “Spare Drive”. I deleted the array and tried each disk separately in XP, a method that worked for me in the past with my Promise RAID controller and my RAID 1 failed years ago. Unfortunately, when XP finds the drive is not recognized as a formatted disk and asks me to format the drive, which of course, I do not know do.
There must be some way to the data on one disk drive access be. I do not care about copying the array. I just want the data, which is very important to me that many hours of videos and my wifes family databases, including things.
The physical copy discs appear to OK.
Has anyone encounted this type of RAID 1 before?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Alan
Re:Originally posted by: guy
Alan,
Turn on your PM
Done. Sorry, I have not used PM in this forum before.
Re:Alan,
Turn on your PM
Re:If you have the software, it is actually a pretty easy recovery.
Re: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
Re:Originally posted by: guy
Originally posted by: guy
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.
Re:Originally posted by: guy
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.
Re:Originally posted by: guy
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.
Re:Wow, that REALLY sucks. That's the whole purpose of a RAID1 setup. Did it fail while in windows or on cold restart?
Re: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.
Re:UseNet post about somebody with a very similar problem — lots of suggestions, but no solution. (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus/browse_thread/thread/6cd3121b97d719c5/b9ee7924936113a5?lnk=st&q=recover+raid+data+silicon&rnum=1#b9ee7924936113a5)
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.
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