No booting after building and deleting raid 1

[HipHoper]

Hi,

I'm playing with this SI3132 PCI-X card that I have.
It works nicely when you create raid 1 before installing windows but I encountered this problem and I will be happy for clarification.
I installed windows 7 on one drive connected to the raid card. It asked me for the driver when i started to install windows (Because windows didn't have a built in driver for the card), Which I gave it's path and everything installed fine.
Now....I wanted to create a raid 1 AFTER windows was installed, So I tried the card's bios to create raid 1 after I connected similar drive to the free sata port.
I chose to create raid 1 without data copy (Wanted to copy it under the windows utility).
When I tried to boot the drive, It gave me the NTLDR error (Press CTRL+Aly+Del to rebbot).
I entered the card's bios and deleted the raid 1, but it still didn't booted (Now he gave me the "non system disk error").
I've booted with Hiren mini xp and I can see that the data still remained on the 1st drive.
Is it possible to fix the boot/mbr, Or will it be better to start from fresh ? (That is to create raid 1 and THEN to install windows)

Thank you

Update :
Just changed in the bios the status of the single drive to "concatenation" which is basically JBOD mose, And it boots......that is strange, But i would really like to know how to create the raid 1 after windows was installed

[slgrieb]

You're much better off creating the array before you install Windows and preceding from there. Like almost everything else computer-related, RAID controllers have traded functionality for price. Increasingly I encounter RAID controllers that can't successfully rebuild an array from a single working drive at the BIOS level, and can't accomplish it with their drive management software running under Windows either.

At this point you may be asking yourself, "Why bother with RAID?" Mostly, these days, I wouldn't. More and more, I recommend frequent backups to external hard drives. Ghost and TrueImage are excellent tools. Currently, TrueImage lets you configure the software to automatically back up changed data files every 5 minutes. Combined with frequent full backups, that's excellent coverage. On the other hand, over the last year or so, every RAID 1 recovery I've attempted has been far more time consuming and costly than just restoring a backup.

[MobilePCPhysician]

Small office? Windows Home Server. Backs up every computer every day. Plus has raid 1 built in.

[HipHoper]

Thank for sharing your experience Slg.It is very helpful to know that a professional like you looked into this raid thing and experienced with it. I still prefer to try Raid 1 and will stick to the pre-windows-installation routine.

@ MPP, That might be a great OS for file sharing only, But for example one of my client needs database server to run on his server (Not sure if it's SQL), And I'm afraid that in that case HOME SERVER wont do.

BTW Microsoft disable the TCP/IP open connection limit they implemented in XP SP2 and 1st edition of Vista, So now I use Windows 7 professional X64 for all of my clients who need basic server and it's quite cheap and efficient.

[CeeBee]

i would really like to know how to create the raid 1 after windows was installed

Since the driver is already installed at least you are lucky.
Ghost the windows install to another drive, build the raid array, ghost back over the array.

[HipHoper]

Thanks CB.
I never thought it's best to do it, But as I think of it now, Sometimes it's the only option, And it can be good for a stable OS.

[pbolduc]

here's my two cents....

For instance lets say you created the RAID before you installed the OS and now lets pretend one of your hard-drives fails. Now your RAID is in a degraded state as it is only operating with one working drive therefore the mirror is technically broken. You should be able to delete and re-create the mirror without losing data as long as you know which drive contains the valid data. I haven't worked with that type of raid controller before but here is what I would try. See if the RAID driver software allows you to establish the RAID in windows as some Raid driver software allows you to configure the RAID controller from with in windows.

Failing that, make sure the new drive your attaching doesn't have any partitions already on it. You should be able to select the HOST drive in the firmware to indicate which drive will actually function as the primary drive in the mirror. The second drive will just be a cached copy and should sync after telling it to create the mirror. If you get frusted with the limitations of the RAID BIOS configurator or driver here is what you can do that will work.

1) Clone your data to a spare non mirrored drive.
2) Blank both drives you will use for the mirror. & *Establish Quick Mirror from RAID controller firmware
3) Shut off the computer connect your cloned backup drive and copy its contents to the mirrored drives. This works every time. Just a bit lengthy. You will need a program like Symantec Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to do the clone and restore process. Ghost maybe found on that Hiren's CD you have hehe =)
4) Final step, verify mirror to ensure performance and operational status.

Good luck with that mirror. I've been running RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10 here. Personally from experience i'd never do this again. Ideally this is what you should do: Stripe 2 120GB SSD's together for insane performance. Get all your apps installed. Clone them to a bootable DVD Backup restore DVD disk. Sync all your important document files from your computer to a D-link DNS-343 (RAID WHATEVER IS AFFORDABLE). Use your DNS-343 as a print server. Perfect Small Network & Backup Solution.

[CeeBee]

You should be able to delete and re-create the mirror without losing data as long as you know which drive contains the valid data.

Once you delete a RAID volume the data is lost.
The right procedure is to remove the damaged drive, install a new one and add it to the array. Then re-build the array.

[pbolduc]

Ceebee this isn't true for all Raid controllers. Even though the raid controller software gives you a warning and says it will destroy all data on the drive it doesn't. Infact all the data is present until the Raid is rebuilt over top of the existing data. Then the data is over written over time. Typically what I have seen is when you delete a raid volume the data will still remain in tact on both drives. It just breaks the mirroring function between the two drives. Causing the drives to be out of sync with each other. Breaking a mirror merely just breaks the array but the data isn't taken off the drive until the drive is formatted.

You just have to becareful which way you rebuild the Mirror. If you reverse the rebuilding order yes you will blank both drives successfully and it will appear that by breaking the mirror and re-creating it you effectively lost everything. That's just because the wrong HOST drive was chosen as the primary disk and effectively the blank drive over wrote the drive containing the data instead of the other way around. Typically the RAID software asks you which drive you want to use as the source to rebuild a mirrored array just don't choose the blank drive.

Some people on these forms think I make stuff up. Please feel free to see this link from Intel explains better. This also is applicable to Dynamic Disks which are RAIDED through Windows Server as well.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-022836.htm

As for Hiphoper's concern I believe when he converted his SATA controller mode in the BIOS from IDE compatible or AHCI to RAID he effectively changed his ARC path in the boot.ini hence the reason for his error NTLDR is missing or corrupt. He could have booted from an XP OEM CD, started the recovery console, repair option, then from the command line typed "map" <enter> which would map the ARC path of his Windows Operating system so that he could take that path and map it properly back into his boot.ini file that he could use in an XP Boot disk (boot.ini,ntdetect.com & ntldr) to load the OS.

From there he could load windows IF.... If he had already pre-injected the proper RAID driver into the OS ahead of time so that he could load windows where he would be able to change the boot.ini file manually from within windows then reboot and all would be fine.

If he failed to inject the raid drives into the windows install before converting his SATA controller to RAID Mode he will end up with a STOP 0x7B error on bootup as the mass storage device drivers would not be present to load the proper driver for his RAID controller.

Building a mirror which contains data takes forever. Its better to just build a mirror with no data on the drives at all by doing a fast build and format. Once the mirror is built then copy your files to it. After all is said and done perform a verify to ensure its integrity as a fast build doesn't do a full check or synchronize of the drives until this process has finished. This will ensure better operation and performance of your mirror!

I've restored data from a RAID5 having 2 drives fail simultaneously. Thankfully, only 1 drive was a real coaster, the other failed drive was due to bad sectors, but I was able to be rebuild the RAID 5 using RAID recovery software to recover the missing pieces of the pie from the first failed drive even though 2 drives were degraded from the RAID and one was dead. The funny thing about it was I removed all RAID 5 drives from that computer and established the RAID recovery on a separate computer which had no RAID controller in it at all but was licensed to use the RAID recovery software to mimic the RAID configuration through a software driver and voila! My Data!. There's a bedtime story =)

[CeeBee]

Ceebee this isn't true for all Raid controllers. Even though the raid controller software gives you a warning and says it will destroy all data on the drive it doesn't. Infact all the data is present until the Raid is rebuilt over top of the existing data.

That highly depends on the controller, indeed. Those I have worked with have *all* destroyed the data upon deleting a mirror volume (ex drives showed blank, no partition).

[HipHoper]

Thank you Pbold and CB for sharing from your great experience.

[pbolduc]

I agree with you too CeeBee, so when dealing with RAID arrays always have a good backup and yeild on the side of caution when building or deleting an array. If you are unsure of the procedure since it appears there is no standard way of handling these types of scenarios consult your documentation on your RAID card before you go deleting or adding anything.

Best of luck and I hope we were able to provide you with some insight to your question.

Take care & Merry Christmas! =)

[HipHoper]

Thank you SO MUCH Pbolduc. You've provided me with a lot of raid-wisdom. Your conclusion post was great. Happy Xmas :O)