Bios not Detecting Disk Drives

[willgk]

Hi, I'm running out of places to ask this question so hopefully i'll be able to find someone here who has experienced/fixed the issue i'm having!

About 1 year ago I built a machine:

Asus Crosshair II
AMD X4 Phenom 9850
GeForce EVGA GTX 280
4gb of Ram
Highpoint-Tech Raid Controller (RocketRaid 2320)

For the longest time I had 6 320gb disks attached to my RR2320 split into multiple arrays. I had 3 640gb arrays each consisting of 2 disks striped for increased performance. 1 for the OS, 1 for the Games, 1 for Storage. I could never boot off this "OS" array because for some reason my bios could never locate the raid array, so I would have to pop a windows disc in and just not click the button to go into the windows setup and it would load the os.

So time progressed and I wanted to get rid of that bug and could find no help so i decided to strip the initial array for "OS" and turn it in 2 separate 320gb disks and install os's on them. So now we come to my new problem that is plaguing me. I have Windows 7 installed on 1 disk. The disks are WDC disks (western digital). When I turn the system on from a powered off state and the Bios begins Detecting Disks it shows something like the following:

Detecting Disks
Sata 1...............
Sata 2...............
Sata 3...............None
Sata 4...............Lite-On (DVDRW)

As you can tell from that Sata 1 & 2 are where i have these ex-raid disks mounted. So essentially I am completely unable to boot because the Bios doesn't even recognize what they are. So I found that if i put in PARTED MAGIC disc and boot up and mount -n /dev/sda2 /mnt then after mounting it reboot and remove the CD the bios now can see the disks and shows them like:

Detecting Disks
Sata 1...............WDC Whatever HD 320GB
Sata 2...............WDC Whatever HD 320GB
Sata 3...............None
Sata 4...............Lite-On (DVDRW)


Any assistance with figuring out how to permanently resolve this would be amazing!

 

[Kill@dor]

1) Do you know what settings the jumpers on the back of the drives ?

2) Are these drives formated in NTFS, FAT or FAT 32?

3) What does the screen say when you try to load Windows?

It sounds like something was corrupted with your raid, may have even corrupted the OS and you may need to reformat. But before we determine that, we should get the facts.

 

[willgk]

1) These drives do not have jumpers as they are sata only drives

2) Drives are NTFS and also have been formatted EXT3 including low level NTFS formats across the entire structure. I've also wiped the first bits on the drive to reset all the raid info (at least to the best of my capability).

3) The disks aren't recognized so if I haven't ran PARTED MAGIC it just says NO SYSTEM DISK INSERTED.

I've reformatted them numerous times and also switched them out for other disks that were also in that raid setup. I feel that it's either A) I didn't reset the initial blocks on the disk so it still thinks it's in a raid and parted magic just temporarily fixes that. or B) something wonky is in the bios. ;(

 

[jsrudd]

I'm not able to speak to the RAID question specifically, but I had a problem where I couldn't boot windows on my netbook unless I inserted a flash drive that booted like a windows CD and then chose the partition to boot from. They way I fixed that was to use Gparted to mark the windows partition as /boot and then everything worked. Also might want to boot to recovery console and try fixing the mbr.

 

[willgk]

This has nothing to do with boot partitions though sadly. This completely has to do with the bios not recognizes the disks on fresh boot (not reboot only fresh boot (from a powered off standpoint)) When you use PARTED MAGIC for some reason it causes them to become visible to the bios as if a driver is loaded into memory or something.

I'm not entirely sure how the malfunction is occurred

 

[peggy]

Hi, I'm running out of places to ask this question so hopefully i'll be able to find someone here who has experienced/fixed the issue i'm having!

About 1 year ago I built a machine:

Asus Crosshair II
AMD X4 Phenom 9850
GeForce EVGA GTX 280
4gb of Ram
Highpoint-Tech Raid Controller (RocketRaid 2320)

For the longest time I had 6 320gb disks attached to my RR2320 split into multiple arrays. I had 3 640gb arrays each consisting of 2 disks striped for increased performance. 1 for the OS, 1 for the Games, 1 for Storage. I could never boot off this "OS" array because for some reason my bios could never locate the raid array, so I would have to pop a windows disc in and just not click the button to go into the windows setup and it would load the os.

So time progressed and I wanted to get rid of that bug and could find no help so i decided to strip the initial array for "OS" and turn it in 2 separate 320gb disks and install os's on them. So now we come to my new problem that is plaguing me. I have Windows 7 installed on 1 disk. The disks are WDC disks (western digital). When I turn the system on from a powered off state and the Bios begins Detecting Disks it shows something like the following:

Detecting Disks
Sata 1...............
Sata 2...............
Sata 3...............None
Sata 4...............Lite-On (DVDRW)

As you can tell from that Sata 1 & 2 are where i have these ex-raid disks mounted. So essentially I am completely unable to boot because the Bios doesn't even recognize what they are. So I found that if i put in PARTED MAGIC disc and boot up and mount -n /dev/sda2 /mnt then after mounting it reboot and remove the CD the bios now can see the disks and shows them like:

Detecting Disks
Sata 1...............WDC Whatever HD 320GB
Sata 2...............WDC Whatever HD 320GB
Sata 3...............None
Sata 4...............Lite-On (DVDRW)


Any assistance with figuring out how to permanently resolve this would be amazing!

Hello,

Your bios could never locate the raid array.Is raid card or motherboard Bios ?

So I have another question,there was you turn it in 2 separate 320GB disks has connected motherbroad or raidcard2320?

Because I knew,if you used the WD hard disk,you can't disable the staggered spin-up when you have enable staggered spin-up on RAID card.your hard disk can't be recognized by motherboard without the function of staggered spin-up.

 

[willgk]

Thanks Peggy! That's a very good idea. Will I have to replug the drives back into the raid array to disable staggered spin-up, and yes i did enable staggered spin-up at one time or another.

 

[willgk]

Sadly i've tried everything i can to undo the staggered spin-up. I am unable to. Any tips on how to get this crap off this drive would be appreciated!

 

[peggy]

I think the problem should cause by WD. Because I know when you enable staggered spin-upWD hard disk it can't disable staggered spin-up, so the only way is repeir your HDD and try again.