Recover RAID1 drive

[RichPLS]

I have a Asus A8R-MVP mobo with the ULI SATA RAID controller and setup two boot drives as RAID0, and two data drives as RAID1, worked fine.
Well I re-installed XP on the RAID0 and now I can see the other two drives as RAID1, but the only options in Disk Management are delete partition, Assign a drive letter is greyed out.
It is showing up as Disk 1, 232.88GB NTFS, Healthy (Active).

How do I access it to assign a drive letter without losing data on the drive?

 

[RichPLS]

This thing has sat here all year with no answers?!?

 

[blue68f100]

Haven't tried that. I would think you would have to set it up before window starts, like you did with your Raid-0. If no sucess make sure you have the latest RAID drives.

Asus has FAQ that cover raid setups.
May have to contact Asus Tech Support. I have used them in the past and they are pretty good. But may take several days to respond.

 

[pat]

newer ULI drivers as a RAID manager, as I found out for my Asrock when updating the drivers. Maybe you should try newer drivers directly from uli?

 

[RichPLS]

I am downloading drivers now.
If I just disconnect one drive of the RAID 1 array, will the other one read as standalone drive and allow me access?

 

[pat]

The controller should show an unhealty array and offer you the option to rebuild. I never try anythig as RAID1... to me it is a waste of HDD storage to have a full drive mirror for only a few gigs of important stuff and personnal data.

The HDD mirror should anyway show only one drive... the mirror not being acessible from within the OS.

 

[RichPLS]

Actually you get quite a good read benifit...and supposedly security... :?

RAID 1, also called "Mirror".

In a mirrored volume, two exact copies of data are written to two member disks. Thus a "shadow" disk is an exact copy of its "primary" disk. This layout can tolerate loss of any single disk (read requests will be satisfied from the functional disk). Mirrored volume features twice the read speed of a single disk: when requested to read data blocks 1 through 6, the mirror routes odd blocks (D1, D3, D5) to be read from Disk 1 and even blocks (D2, D4, D6) from Disk 2 so that each disk does half of the job. Write speed is not improved because all copies of a mirror need updating.

It is possible to have more than two disks in the mirrored set (e.g. three-disk configuration - "primary" with two "shadows"), but such a setup is extremely rare due to the high disk space overhead (66% overhead in three-disk configuration).

Exactly two disks are required for a RAID 1 volume. RAID 1 layout imposes 50% storage space overhead.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raid.htm

RAID 1: Mirroring and Duplexing

RAID Level 1 requires a minimum of 2 drives to implement

Advantages:
* One Write or two Reads possible per mirrored pair
* Twice the Read transaction rate of single disks, same Write transaction rate as single disks
* 100% redundancy of data means no rebuild is necessary in case of a disk failure, just a copy to the replacement disk
* Transfer rate per block is equal to that of a single disk
* Under certain circumstances, RAID 1 can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failures
* Simplest RAID storage subsystem design

Disadvantages:
*Highest disk overhead of all RAID types (100%) - inefficient
*Lower write performance

Recommended Use:
*Accounting , Payroll , Financial
*Any application requiring very high availability
*Dual data storage from important files

http://www.madshrimps.be/printart.php?articID=69

 

[RichPLS]

Updated to ULi drivers direct, version 2.13, and still not able to access RAID1 array. ;(

 

[pat]

I know what RAID 1 is, I just don't see why on desktor computer.. It might be just me, but it waste hdd..

Then..maybe that, if the hdd was not meant to be use as RAID first, then you cannot simply use it as RAID without first, creating the array with that drive. RAID metadata has to be written to HD that contain RAID type and information stuff. I don't know if using an existing hdd and creating an array with it will make it loose all the data on it. You may try to copy the data to your other hdd and do a fresh start