Intel Matrix storage failure by just unplugging the drive?

I have an Intel 965OT motherboard (genuine Intel brand) and am running the embeded matrix storage on RAID 0 with 2 SATA seagate 400gb hd's. This was working great for a long time. I also had a single 200gb drive in the machine not in the raid set. So the 800gb total was in one set (bootable c: w/ xp on it), and the 200gb was by itself (d

I wanted to run an experiment, so I unplugged the raid. Unfortunately, I unplugged one of the 400's and the 200, not the 2 400's. Boot and do the quick dope-slap at the list of discovered HD's on BIOS post. I shut it off and plug the right ones in - didn't even really let it boot. But now the raid doesn't work. Even thought the drives are all plugged back in and nothing has changed on the drives, the matrix storage thing tells me that the RAID set is unbootable and "failed". What the heck? If I just unplug a raid drive and and then plug it in again, it fails and won't let me get my data back!?! Anybody have any ideas on how to get my raid back? It sounds like the raid thinks a drive failed and just needs to be told "no, its ok - try to recover". The bios RAID offers fun things like create/delete/exit which is no help. Can I just delete and recreate the raid with the same drives and not lose the data? Any help would be greatly appreciated - I don't want to have to reconstruct this data...

Thanks

It seems like there should be some way to tell the raid to 'reset'/ignore the last failure and try again. I mean, the data has absolutely not been changed, it's just the motherboard thinking it's dead. Could I do a bios/board reset via jumper and plug the drives back in for 'rediscovery'?

You should be able to recover the data using Active Undelete (http://www.active-undelete.com) .This will be time-consuming & will still require windows reinstall but will at least get your data back.

That's scary though that striped raid could go down that easy.

Jo

Thanks - I just mailed Intel, we'll see what happens.

Interesting. So the 'failure' data is written to the drive. There has to be recovery software out there that might be able to recover the data. I can boot to the standalone drive, and it shows my 800gb set as 'unpartitioned' so it does 'appear' to windows. I kept pretty good backups, so all I need is a few files. Any tools out there for this sort of thing? I see Runtime Software has some raid recovery tools - any others?

Do you have RAID enabled in the BIOS? You know, that option where you select IDE, AHCI or RAID?

Yes, RAID is enabled. I tried switching to AHCI and back, but no luck. What is the difference between AHCI and RAID anyway?

Advanced Host Control Interface is single-drive SATA. Otherwise, to use a SATA drive you will me emulating IDE. AHCI supports command queuing.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks allows you to span physical volumes and includes the features of AHCI

make sure you plugged the SATA drives into the same sata ports on the mobo. Also try to do a CTL+I I think to get into your RAID manager during boot up. There should be a repair function in there.

Guys,
I've found a solution to this "sudden drop-out" problem that Intel Matrix Storage had.

My exact problem was that I had two disks in mixed RAID0-RAID1 configuration for both speed and safety. While I was updating the BIOS of my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 ICH9R) the matrix storage decided to drop-out one the disks and label it as "Non-Raid" which led to Degraded RAID1 and FAILED RAID0. AS my OS (Windows XP + Windows 7 dual boot) was on the RAID0 I felt "toasted". I did a lot of reading the other day and found a solution that helped me NOT loose ANY data at all
This post here "showed me the light"
http://forums.extremeoverclocking. [...] ostcount=6

As the OP wrote, deleting RAID arrays in the BIOS (O-ROM) doesn't actually delete your data - only the metadata that tells the Matrix Storage what arrays are configured. It also clears the MBR and partition tables but with a tool like TestDisk you can easily fix this.

This absolutely saved my day (and a couple of nights to be precise).

I hope this helps someone else too

mamw93,
who are you talking to? If it's me I have to say that you are wrong. If you unplug a drive from a raid0 array and you don't write any data to the other drive(s) you don't loose any data ... yet. If you put back the drive back your data will be just fine. The problem with Intel Matrix Storage is that it doesn't allow you to easily reattach the drive if it had decided that it's not part of the array anymore. Then you have only one option - to recreate the ABSOLUTELY EXACT SAME array. This way the real data is not changed - only the metadata of the array configuration is rewritten.

Thanks for the replies in this post, the re-create array and testdisk combo sorted out a "failed" array due to pushing limits on an overclock.

Didn't want to risk setting the missing disk as spare in the Storage Manager in case that didn't work properly, anyone tried this?