Mirror Healthy, But Not Appearing In Windows

Izzeh

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Dec 11, 2009
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18,510
Hello everyone,

I seek your wisdom, because I'm tired of this problem which I can't apparently solve, and just want to move on with actually using my PC.

5 SATA Hard Drives. Two in a Striped RAID, two in a Mirror RAID, one as an Operating System Drive.

ASUS M4N72-E Motherboard with 6 SATA Ports; 1-4 are Standard Usage, 5-6 are dedicated RAID ports.

Three Hard Drives installed into ports 1, 3 and 4, the third and fourth being the Mirror. Two Hard Drives installed into 5 and 6, these are the Stripe.

Now, I Enabled RAID on the SATA Ports before I did any Windows 7 (Pro 64bit) installation, planning ahead knowing there would be a Mirror on them eventually. I installed the OS, went smoothly. Set up the Stripe RAID through the RAID BIOS, that went fine too and it works; visible from Disc Management and formatted to NTFS. But... the Mirror is just driving me crackers.

As I said, RAID is enabled. Utilising the RAID Bios, I can see the Stripe marked as healthy. I go to add a new RAID Array, I select the two 750Gb Seagates, say yes to losing the data on them, and say yes to clearing the Master Boot Record. They are both visible in the List, all is hunky dory. So I save, and reboot to Windows.

Disc Management, or Storage under the Nvidia Panel, neither can see it. At all. It's invisible, it's in stealth mode, the Mirror array is a Chameleon perched safely upon a green plant leaf, perfectly masked, and cannot be observed even to the trained eye.

For the life of me, I do not understand why it's not appearing. I moved this Mirror RAID Array from my old computer to this one: I accept it's not as simple as a straight swap because they are carefuly designed and setup by the RAID Controller they are managed by. I have all it's information backed up and have tried various ways to JUST get it to be seen, but no luck.

When the Seagates are NOT compiled into a RAID formation, they are visible last I tried this - within Windows, I can access one of them, the other I can't for some reason - maybe because of the way they are formatted. I do remember seeing Disc Management complain once about them have the same Signatures or something, I presume because they were preconfigured to be fundamentally identical.

So, I'd just very much like to find a way to get them Mirrored and working, via the SATA ports, because I really don't wanna use the only PCI Slot I have inserting my old RAID Controller. And I briefly tried a software approach using the Nvidia Storage facility, but that tries for 3 minutes trying to configure the array, then it just gives up without any error messages whatsoever, and the drives are invisible until I restart Windows.

Sites like these suggest I'm on the right track and it should work, but... O_O Apparently not.

Thanks very much for your help in advance on this one, because I'm losing the plot right now, hehe ^^;; If there's anything else you need to know, drop a line!

~ Izzeh
 

Izzeh

Distinguished
Dec 11, 2009
2
0
18,510
I can't edit my own post, presumably because too much time has passed.

I just tried my old PCI RAID Controller for the sake of it, and set up a Mirror within it's BIOS no problem. But the same problem has occured again, it's not visible from Windows 7!? So at this rate I'll have to choose a software route, and let Windows Disc Management deal with the Mirror. I even worry if that'll work, because the Storage Panel in the NVidia Control panel fails to create a Mirror array with them as well.

This just gets better and better, eh?

I keep reading about complex steps to set-up RAID's, regarding driver installations done from Floppy Discs at the BIOS level and stuff, I don't recall doing this whatsoever when I made my Mirror last time. Am I missing something? Maybe I should install everything from my Motherboard Driver Disc, to see if it picks up on anything. I already installed the Chipset drivers, maybe I should just bung everything else from it onto Windows 7, despite there isn't anything in the Device Manager with a question mark.