MA78GM-S2H RAID help!

[rmartin7]

I have two 250GB SATA drives set up as RAID 1 (mirrored). One of them accidentally got unplugged from power for several weeks, and when it was plugged back in, it won't sync back up to the raid array. The raid bios has an array set up that's supposed to have the two drives, it just says the second one is missing. My thought was to delete the array and reform it, but I don't know if that's going to result in wiping the drive(s) (the raid bios's warning kind of indicates that it will)

I updated the system BIOS to the newest stable version (F11), and this updated the RAID bios to version 3.0.1540.43, which isn't any more helpful than the old one (1540.28). It doesn't have any support for manually mirroring the working drive onto the one that was unplugged.

Basically, if I erase the array, am I going to risk wiping the drive in the process? Also, when I add it to a new array, will I be able to tell it which one has the current data on it?

 

[rmartin7]

Well, what's the point of having a raid then, if you end up having to wipe both drives when all that's happened is one got unplugged? A raid is supposed to give you redundancy of data, not make it easier to lose. There's not even anything physically wrong with the drives, the only thing that's wrong seems to be the limited capabilities of the raid BIOS.

Any more input?

 

[rmartin7]

Here's what would have been a helpful answer: Install AMD's RAIDXpert utility. That's all that was needed to fix it, as it turns out. Once I installed that, it had already recognized the missing drive and started rebuilding the RAID before I even managed to open the program.

Some hints in case anyone else runs into this:
■RaidXpert is hard to find for download, due to confusing organization on AMD's site. I ended up having to search for the chipset model on AMD's site and finding it under an FAQ, rather than under, say, a download.
■When you first open RaidXpert, it will ask for a login. By default, the username and password are both "admin."

Hopefully this will save somebody else the trouble I had with this, because the solution turned out to be pretty simple.

 

[spooky2th]

Thanks for the input/info! This is really good to know.