Win7 picking up 2 discs as Raid, but its not

[jdiroffii]

Thanks for taking the time. First post on Tom's Hardware.

I have a custom built rig running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit. I have 5 internal harddisks. 1 OCZ 120 GB SSD (system), 1 - 1 TB, 2 - 500 GB, 1 - 120 GB. Asus P8Z77-V LX mobo.

Before purchasing the SSD, I was running the system installation via a hardware Raid 0 across the 2 500GB drives. This was with a different mobo. I purchased the SSD and a new Asus mobo together several months ago. I turned everything into JBOD and performed a clean Win 7 installation onto the SSD. The 2 500GB were assigned individual drive letters and I used them as regular data repositories.

Last week I started having some issues and decided to clean and reformat my PC. I took the entire case apart, cleaned up everything and put it back together with just the mobo and SSD. I installed windows and performed all updates. I then hooked up the 4 harddisks and my gpu.

BIOS is set to AHCI and picks up all 4 disks individually.

Windows 7 picks up my 2 500GB as a single TB drive. When I open disk manager, it asks me to initialize the disk with a MBR or GUID.

Both disks are holding very important data. One has all of my documents and the other pictures and software. I don't currently have a backup of the data so its critical that I find a way to at least copy the data off of the discs before trying any initialization or format procedures within windows. I've considered booting up with linux to get the data off. However, there must be a way through Windows to correct the way it is seeing the discs.

I did some research and I found some information about software Raid in windows, but nothing specific to my problem here.

I appreciate your help. Let me know what additional information you may require.

 

[jdiroffii]

Also interesting, in my troubleshooting, I tried to just use each disc individually, so only 1 500GB drive at a time. Windows still picks it up at as a 1 TB and asks me to initialize. That one struck me as a little weird. I figure the harddisks must have some data in their formatting telling the OS that it is part of a RAID.

 

[13thmonkey]

what exactly do you mean by setting them all to jbod, jbod is not strictly the same as not being in a raid array. jbod can mean that your 3 drives 1TB + 2x 500GB would be seen as one giant disk, but still neither raid 0 or 1, just a bunch of disks put together to act as one.

now that means that you could have has jbod set up in bios on your other machine with each disk in a jbod array of one disk, i've no idea how you'd get over that at the moment.

any more information you can provide would be helpful, you've provided a lot, but we need more specifics.

 

[jdiroffii]

what exactly do you mean by setting them all to jbod, jbod is not strictly the same as not being in a raid array. jbod can mean that your 3 drives 1TB + 2x 500GB would be seen as one giant disk, but still neither raid 0 or 1, just a bunch of disks put together to act as one.

now that means that you could have has jbod set up in bios on your other machine with each disk in a jbod array of one disk, i've no idea how you'd get over that at the moment.

any more information you can provide would be helpful, you've provided a lot, but we need more specifics.

By JBOD, I mean that every disc is completely separate. No drives put together or in any kind of array. When I did the reinstall several months ago after purchasing the ssd and new mobo, I never enabled the hardware RAID configuration in the BIOS, and formatted each of the 500GB drives so each one was just a plain NTFS drive. After installing windows on the SSD at that time, I did not have any issues using the 2 500GB drives as individual drives.

After doing this most recent reinstallation of windows, Windows is picking up the two 500GB drives as one, even if only one of the two drives is connected. Either one, or both, connected shows an uninitialized 1 TB disk in Disk Management. So that makes 3 different ways I can hook up these 2 drives and they show up as a single TB disk.

 

[jdiroffii]

I was able to resolve this issue by reinstalling Windows with all the drives connected.

 

[13thmonkey]

risky, i was thinking of the least risk solution, but glad you have fixed it. FYI JBOD is not the same as just having some disks. If JBOD is mentioned anywhere in your system as being how the disks are working be very careful, you might need to move everything off so that you can de-jbod them.