K7N2-Delta-ILSR failing after Micro$oft AMD K7 windowsupda..

[steve]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.msi-microstar (More info?)

Hi,

I hav a MSI K7N2-Delta-ILSR Mobo and it has 2 160GB Maxtor
SATA drives attached. I installed the system in June 2003
with winXP and RAID 0 Striping mode. The system has worked
beautifully for more than a year. I a made the critical
error of letting Windowsupdate grab updates and load them
to my system to update a hardware based update for the AMD
K7 chips. I read the info and it looked like a proper patch
and I have used windowsupdate regularly to pacth the SPs on
my XP box, etc.

The issue is that right after that K7 patch my system goes through
POST and gets the FastBuild Raid section and I see flashing "Offline"
for my RAID 0 setup. I can press Control-F and get into the Promise
Fast Build utility but it will not let me bring the RAID drives
"online". When I go through the various menus it shows that only
1 drive is now in the raid system but no matter what combination of
menus I go through it will not let me bring the second drive back
into the array even though I never removed it!!!

I am desperate here as I don't want to lose all my data. Anyone have
*any* ideas or had this problem before and can offer some advice it
is *GREATLY* appreciated.

Thanks!!!

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.msi-microstar (More info?)

"Steve" <stelee@cisco.com> wrote in message
news:1093202002.809733@sj-nntpcache-5...
> Hi,
>
> I hav a MSI K7N2-Delta-ILSR Mobo and it has 2 160GB Maxtor
> SATA drives attached. I installed the system in June 2003
> with winXP and RAID 0 Striping mode. The system has worked
> beautifully for more than a year. I a made the critical
> error of letting Windowsupdate grab updates and load them
> to my system to update a hardware based update for the AMD
> K7 chips. I read the info and it looked like a proper patch
> and I have used windowsupdate regularly to pacth the SPs on
> my XP box, etc.
>
> The issue is that right after that K7 patch my system goes through
> POST and gets the FastBuild Raid section and I see flashing "Offline"
> for my RAID 0 setup. I can press Control-F and get into the Promise
> Fast Build utility but it will not let me bring the RAID drives
> "online". When I go through the various menus it shows that only
> 1 drive is now in the raid system but no matter what combination of
> menus I go through it will not let me bring the second drive back
> into the array even though I never removed it!!!
>
> I am desperate here as I don't want to lose all my data. Anyone have
> *any* ideas or had this problem before and can offer some advice it
> is *GREATLY* appreciated.
>
> Thanks!!!

I don't have any experience of this happening myself - but according to the
MSI serial ata raid manual it says -
"Offline - A striped array has 1 drive that has failed or been disconnected.
When the array condition is "offline," the user must replace the failed
drive(s), then restore data from a backup source."

You could check all the cables to the drives and check the bios settings to
ensure that the "integrated peripherals" section of the bios config has your
S-ATA channels correctly configured.
If it appears that both drives are still physically working - but the raid
is corrupt - then it MAY be possible to re-create the array without total
loss of data.
According to the Promise raid controller web site -

"If one of the RAID 0 hard drives has failed, it is not possible to recover
your data. If all of the members of the array are still functioning, it may
be possible to recover your data. In the FastBuild BIOS utility, delete the
array and re-create it [ IMPORTANT: Make sure that when you recreate the
array you use exactly the same array settings (RAID level, drive
assignments, and stripe size) of the original array ]. Going offline may
indicate trouble with a hard drive, so it is recommended to perform a data
backup and then perform a disk diagnostic on the hard drives."

Dave