GA-EX58-UD – Intel Raid 0 failed after update to F4 bios

Hello,

After updating from the F3 to F4 bios I received a RAID “FAIL” prompt on reboot. The second drive on the raid 0 array was no longer a member. I had to delete the array, rebuild and recover from a drive image to get the system up again. It appears stable at present but I have never had this error on any previous MB, and it left me concerned. The system was up and stable for three weeks on the F3 bios prior to the F4 update.

Does anyone know why this would happen and/or has anyone experienced the same problem?

Should I be concerned with the bios build or the motherboard?

Thanks…

Er, when you update your BIOS, everything goes back to the default settings, which means your RAID controller was likely turned off, all of your boot settings and such were probably defaulted back for a single drive.
If you would have simply went back into the BIOS, turned the controller back on, reset your boot preferences-entered the RAID BIOS, pointed it back to the original drives in RAID, it should have found and re-established the array perfectly fine.

I had the same problem running a raid 10 array ... here's the answer I received from Intel:

My mistake was not resetting the raid array before the first reboot. Looks like once its gone, its gone.

I agree and you can stop taking tranquilizers... I have actually been running Ghost going back to when it was Powerquest Drive Image. I image to a 1TB internal on the new system, keep current copies on an external 2TB RAID, and store most data on yet another three drives. This is how I recovered from the first fiasco and several subsequent replications. I can replicate the BIOS degrading the RAID array with F3 to F4, but not with F4 to F3, or F4 to F4. Gigabyte support denied any problems but advised that I stay with the F3 BIOS despite the obvious S3 issues. It may also relate to external drives that were attached at the time but I am to tired to crash the RAID again. In all, they had me reset the BIOS old school by pulling the memory and CMOC battery and reverting to F3, The battery latch is of course conveniently located under the video card. The technician also told me to unplug all external USB and SATA drives as they can cause this MB to freeze or hang at boot, and this assertion was very true in my case. At present, my old and fully functional system is conveniently located on a table to the right of the new system, and the new system appears to be running well with F3 and does not hang if the external USB drives are unplugged or off when I boot. The RAID failure is still a bit disconcerting...

I like GB MOBOs, but if I have one complaint (besides, of course, that they seem to run their web-site off an old Apple IIc w/a whole 16K of RAM), it's their lackadaisical attitude toward keeping BIOS updated, and addressing known problems promptly - I've been running a beta BIOS forever, as the previous 'ready-for-prime-time' issue doesn't support E0 stepping of the 9550; it runs OK, I guess, but has various little wierdnesses that I know are just BIOS oddities - wish they'd GTST, and properly support otherwise (with a couple well-known exceptions) their otherwise great boards...

Verily!

Here's a trick:

I use several RAID arrays, and the Intel RAID BIOS has a lag in the reboot while it connects and verifies the drives; on any single reboot, it's no big deal, but when 'BIOS tweaking' it gets really annoying. What I do, after a BIOS flash, or when tweaking, is to leave the RAID off in the BIOS (which speeds up the reboots enormously), but set the first boot drive to the DVD, and pop in a bootable copy of MemTest86+; that way, if I 'miss' the <DEL> to get into the BIOS on the reboot, the DVD 'catches' it, and the system never gets to the hard drives to screw them up...

Better safe than sorry!