Right. So I have a raptor 74 gig drive as my system drive, and a WD 320gig data drive. I bought a duplicate drive to mirror the 320 gig drive, and set it all up through my silicon image BIOSey thingy at boot as a raid 1, copied the data from the original to the new one through this utility, etc. and everything went well. Then I got into windows xpsp2, made sure all the drivers are updated and utilities for handling it are installed, and my problem is:

Disk Management says Disk1(dynamic) is unreadable.

I can right click it and convert it to basic, but I'm afraid of this, because I like my data and I don't know what will happen. My raid utility has it set up like this:

Controller 0 - Sil3114r5
--BigMamma (RG0)

... and channel 0 and 1 show the stats of the drive (298.09GB Mirrored) in green... everything seems cool there.

I wonder though, about the info next to "Controller 0" ... Sil3114r5 indicates to me that it thinks it's a raid5, not raid1 (my fault for not knowing the difference when I installed the drivers, but I don't believe the data itself changed any). I can delete the raid group under controller 0, but I don't know what will happen then either. Has anyone had similar problems before? System info is below:

Mobo: Asus k8n-e deluxe
CPU: Athlon 2700+ 64 bit
1 gig ram stick (corsair xms)
74gig wd raptor with OS installed on it
2 320 gig WD drives (the ones in question)
Radeon 9800xt pro 256
Some fans and dust mixed in.

... I'm at a loss

1/10/2007 12:03:05 AM

I'm at a loss too, why is the disk dynamic, why does it think you have a RAID-5 array?

1/10/2007 8:20:16 AM

My guess is you fuxored it. Try using the raid utility to restore the data. Even if it's set up as a broken RAID-5 array, it should be able to restore the data to 2 disks. You should then be able to copy your data to a third disk, reconfigure your setup, and copy it back.

If the RAID utility will not restore your data then you are fucked. Do not try to restore the data then remove the pairing, because that may fuck things up beyond repair.

1/10/2007 3:39:17 PM

After Asus tech support provided no help, I took one drive, plugged it in as a standard Sata drive, and unplugged the other. Then went into Windows and ran TestDisk to recover the partition tables, which restored the drive and my data.

... so now I have the other drive hooked up as a normal drive and have windows backup automatically copying data to it every couple of days. Not really what I wanted but at least I didn't lose my information.

1/11/2007 11:40:50 AM