RAID1 Degraded - Help me Boot

[bdixon1]

To make a long story short I was running Vista 32 in Raid 1 (mirror). All worked fine until my power supply died at which point I was no longer able to boot. Vista repair does not have a good time with RAID drivers so it wasn’t able to “see” my drive to repair them. Somehow between the dozens of restarts the raid array “degraded” and now I am really up the creek…

Can I disable the raid controller on the BIOS and simply run vista repair on one of the the single drives? It just sounds to easy.

Thanks for your help...

 

[Paperdoc]

Before you go any further, dig up and read the manual for your RAID system!!

The one I'm familiar with provides RAID controllers as software built into the mobo's chipset by nVidia. The mobo manual has some info, but it also came with a CD of software and utilities, including a complete RAID manual. Failing that, you probably can get it downloaded from the website of nVidia (if that's your chipset) or whoever is the right supplier.

Normally recovering from a fault on one disk of a RAID1 set is easy because the RAID software includes all the tools you need. You get into it from the BIOS Setup screens where you first created the RAID1 array. Once there you will find menu choices to examine the RAID1 array and detect any failures. It will tell you exactly which disk has failed and usually also confirm that the other is still OK. Then it will offer to restore the failed disk from the one that's still good, after which you can re-establish the entire RAID1 array.

IF your RAID1 array is provided and managed by a system built into your mobo's chipset, NONE of this RAID1 fixing is done in VISTA repair. However, if your RAID1 is managed by a software utility that was part of VISTA, my experience with that is nil. I still would expect that there are special tools to diagnose and restore a failed RAID1 array, and some decent documentation on them to help.