Raid1 problems plz help

[Gumerk]

I've got a failing hard-drive issue I'm trying to get resolved asap. If anyone can help me out I would be most appreciative. Here's my issue....I've got a Raid1 setup, I really don't know what that means, but whatever lol About a year ago, the second hard-drive failed, but I could repair it through the on-board raid controller Intel(R) Matrix Storage. Well, I kept having to do it over and over again, and DDO was very hard to play, so I tossed it. Since then the computer has been booting up and running fine with just one hard drive. It would give me the message that a hard drive is missing every time I boot up, but that's it.

Well today I came home and got the message saying to insert a boot up disk..I was like what? Anyway, I ctrl alt del and it said the volume had failed. Next, a screen came up and asked me if I wanted to restore the failed volume, and I said yes. After that it booted up just fine with the same message as always. Now, it's about half and half, sometimes I get the fail message and restore volume option, and sometimes I get the regular degraded message and boots up. Anyways, I did a chkdsk and omg it took forever. I was just about 90% done and had to go downstairs. When I came back up I got a blank screen and couldn't get anything to come up, so I don't know if it helped or not.

I just know it was repairing a lot of clusters when I was watching it do its thing. I want to get a new hard drive/drives and copy all of my data onto one that works, but I don't know how. I've got Windows Vista 64 bit, but HP didn't send me a disk to load it on another hard-drive, but I have all the license and keys to it printed out. The only disk HP sent me was Microsoft student office 07. I just want to fix the daggum thing and get back to a computer with no hard drive issues, but I'm scared of losing all of my data on this one hard drive. Thanks yall, and I'll answer any questions about the process or look up info on my computer if anyone needs that to give some advice.

*Info that may be helpful*

Windows Vista Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 2 (build 6002)
2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad
250.05 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
RAID1 [Hard drive] (250.05 GB) -- drive 0, s/n RAID1
Board: ASUSTek Computer INC. Basswood3G 1.05
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 5.09 06/08/2007
HP-Pavilion GG757AV-ABA d4990y
Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller

Here are some screen shots of the raid hard-drive details...

 

[sturm]

I am assuming it's out of warranty?

You need to get a new drive in there ASAP or at least move all your important info off the drive and onto a usb stick or drive before it fails.

the new drive should be the same size or bigger than the current drive. Once the new drive is installed it should rebuild the raid 1 (mirror raid). After its up and running you can remove the other original drive and replace it with a new drive, preferably the same as the other new drive.

 

[Hawkeye22]

RAID 1 is a type of data redundancy. It uses 2 drives which appear as one drive to the operating system. Whenever something is written to that drive, an exact copy is actually written to both drives. If one drive fails the computer can continue to run normally because it has an exact copy of the failed drive. If you were to rmove the bad drive and insert a new one, the RAID controller would then rebuild the array by syncing the older drive to the new one.

By allowing your computer to run with only one of the two drives you defeated the purpose of RAID, which is redundancy.

Hopefully you can back up this drive before it fails.Try to get the exact same make/model of drive as you currently have. At the very least try to get a new drive of the same size or larger. Then add it back into the array and let it rebuild. Good luck!

 

[Gumerk]

Thank you all for the advice, I just ordered 2 of these and payed extra for overnight delivery.

 

[Student549]

Get 3 drives, label them A, B, C and rotate them every month or two. Then the one in the drawer will be only a couple of months old. Raid 1 as a backup method makes a lot of sense, and having one that is NOT in the machine is a great comfort. 1 TB for $60 is cheap, and too hard to backup with an external backup drive, which can also fail...