RAID 5 trouble, plz help?

[dagiffy]

Hello everyone. I'm having a problem and I can't find anything on these boards nor the internet to help me. I have a ICH7R RAID5 set up on my computer. I had some trouble with junk on my system, so I reformated my hard drives and reinstalled Windows XP Pro and navigated my way through getting the computer to see my RAID setup. When all was said and done, on the first screen at bootup all three disks were showing MEMBER in green, and the status was NORMAL in green. Now for the problem. After installing the latest drivers for a few things, I rebooted. Now the status is INITIALIZE in yellow, but all three disks are still MEMBER in green. The system seems to be running slower now, but that might be my imagination. I have searched for hours trying to get a bead on what happened, but I can't find anything that will help me.

Can any of you gurus rescue me? How can I get status back to normal on bootup?

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I take it you have done google research.
So I might start over from scratch. Then install drivers one by one untill that happens, At that point, system restore back and you know where to start looking.

Also, where is the status? In windows? What does the controller status say (ie, push f12 to..)

 

[dagiffy]

The status is shown immediately at bootup, on the screen that pops up almost immediately. It shows RAID 5 configuration status to be INITIALIZE in yellow. Below that is listed all three hard drive disks with the status of MEMBER in green.

It was a real bear to reformat and set up RAID 5 because I had never done it before. I was just hoping for a fix now. The thought of having to do all this over again makes my skin crawl. But if that's what I have to do, that's what I have to do.

I haven't tried using F12. I take it that's done right at startup, correct?
Everything in Device Manager is ok. Well, off to reboot and see what
an F12 button can tell me. Thanks!

 

[SomeJoe7777]

See the following link: Intel Matrix Storage Manager: What is parity initialization?

Did you have an abrupt shut down, such as a blue screen or hard reset? If so, and parity information wasn't written to disk, the RAID controller assumes the parity information on your RAID 5 is corrupted, so it sets out to rebuild all of it on the next reboot.

The initialization may take several hours, but once it finishes, the array will work normally again and be fully redundant.

Also, you should install the Intel Matrix Storage manager so that you can see the array status in Windows.