Spanned Dynamic 9tb drive disappears after reboot

[ttooley]

All seems to setup and work great until I reboot the system. The drive is gone on reboot so I went back to Disk Management were it says it is offline and inactive. Click on reactivate and I get this message.
The attempted operation is invalid. Either the parameters specified are invalid or the operation cannot be completed on the selected object. Refer to Disk Management help for assistance on the correct use of the attempted operation
I have looked at Microsoft and Googled looking for any info I could find to no avail. I have a gateway gm5424 setup running Vista Ultimate. That has a Intel mother board 965 chip set and ICH8 chip set for raid. That Intel limited to 2tb.I have replaced the original power supply (fixed random shut downs), video card (fixed freezes, got rid of shared ram), case (Air flow), CPU cooler (lowered temp by 20deg C) and installed 4gig of ram.
I have lots of music, video's, ISO and pictures to organize off my old hard drives and thumb drives. Which I am looking for a program that can help me organize the files. I do not want to transfer any thing until it is stable. any ideas?

Funds are low after my hard drive purchase. The info I have read points towards a EFI or UEFI Bios replacement? Which would mean a new board, ram, video card and OS. Yet the web and info I have found makes it all sound unstable at this time. Evens Tom's last article was back in 2009. Unless some one can direct me to some thing newer?

Any idea or links to make this spanned drive reload with vista?
Plus I have read lots of people saying there is no disk check or repair software for dynamic spanned drives is this true?
What software can I use to organize photos, videos, iso's, etc?
Are all raid card limited to the 2tb limit?
I only have PCI slots left on my board.
Any help with these issues would be appreciated.

 

[Houndsteeth]

Any time you start spanning volumes together (whether you are using JBOD - just a bunch of disks- or RAID 0) without taking into account for parity information, your entire array will degrade if you lose one member. Even if you are saving parity, such as RAID 5 or 6, if you lose more than one member in your array, your array is degraded at that point.

Most likely, what happened was that one of the drives is either faulty or was shut down at one point, and the array was degraded by the controller. You will have to go back into the controller's setup (either in software or BIOS) and rebuild the array. You may be able to recover the data, but chances are, with a spanned array that quite possibly has no parity, it is a complete loss.

In your case, you are operating without any safety net. All it takes is one burble or power fluctuation with one of your hard drives and you lose the entire volume. While your performance would probably suck, look into implementing RAID 5 using the ICH8 controller instead of using the dynamically spanned volume. And back it all up after you get your media loaded.

 

[ttooley]

Any time you start spanning volumes together (whether you are using JBOD - just a bunch of disks- or RAID 0) without taking into account for parity information, your entire array will degrade if you lose one member. Even if you are saving parity, such as RAID 5 or 6, if you lose more than one member in your array, your array is degraded at that point.

Most likely, what happened was that one of the drives is either faulty or was shut down at one point, and the array was degraded by the controller. You will have to go back into the controller's setup (either in software or BIOS) and rebuild the array. You may be able to recover the data, but chances are, with a spanned array that quite possibly has no parity, it is a complete loss.

In your case, you are operating without any safety net. All it takes is one burble or power fluctuation with one of your hard drives and you lose the entire volume. While your performance would probably suck, look into implementing RAID 5 using the ICH8 controller instead of using the dynamically spanned volume. And back it all up after you get your media loaded.

Update: I down loaded the latest ISR drivers from Intel's web site, unzipped and loaded the drivers before installing Vista. That got rid of the 2tb limit for setup. I Mirrored (Raid 1) the first two drives for the boot drive C:\. This is recognized by my Bios which has a 2tb limit. Then I setup the other four drives as raid 5 for a 5.4tb drive D:\. System booted and I moved the documents folder etc to the drive for safety. Intel's Bios update will not work. I do not know if this is a board manufactured for Gateway problem or what. It all works. The only thing is the bios boot section shows the raid 5 drives as incompatible. Then the driver loads with Vista and they work as one raid 5 drive that has some fault tolerance. Thanks for your input. I am waiting for the UEFI or core boot Bios boards to come out before I upgrade anything else for awhile.

 

[ttooley]

Computer is up and running after lots of web searching and input from Toms thanks for the help!

 

[ttooley]

Best answer selected by ttooley.