RAID5 logical disk "Uninitialized" after Windows 7 crash, will Disk Director help?
I HAD a Win7 D: drive that was a RAID5 2.8 TB logical disk. Windows 7 locked up hard, requiring a power cycle. Now D: is gone and the drive is "Not Initialized".
The power cycle was accomplished by holding down the power button on the PC. After the restart , the D: drive disappeared. The D: is a RAID5 array controlled by an AMD SB750 south bridge. The RAID status via the RAIDXpert management app (really an OEM of some Promise Tech product) reported that things are fine. I ran the synchronize command from RAIDXpert, which completed w/o any messages.
The Windows disk management snap-in reports that the "AMD 2+1 Disk RAID6 SCSI Disk Device" is "Not initialized" and offers to initialize it as MBR or GPT. It used to be GPT. The initialize offer terrifies me, because I fear that I'll lose all my data, which I assume is fine on the array.
Would Acronis be useful to bring this array back to the initailized state w/ all the data intact?
Thanks for the reply.
I haven't ever tried accessing the AMD/Promise Tech from anything other than Windows, so I'll try that.
The "RAIDXPert" management app is a web browser GUI & reports the following:
Physical Drive View:
Four drives are present
For each of the the drives:
"basic info" Drive model, Ser #, FW rev, Port #, Target ID
"Drive info" Status, background activity, capacity, SMART status, Write cache status, SATA type, Command queue.
The relevant (to me) drive statuses are "functional" and SMART status are "healthy"
Logical Drive view:
ONE logical drive with
"basic info" assigned name , RAID level, capacity, status, background activity
"Graphic view" for each of the three drives, which shows capacity assigned to the Logical drive (basically all) and Block info (looks like a rehash of the Physical drive view "drive info"
The reason for the 3 vs. 4 drive mismatch is that the fourth drive is a global spare.
For some reason, the drives are assigned to LD 2, I ASSUME they've always been assigned to LD 2.
So, I think the simple answer to what the RAID app does is it reports drive status AND can sync ("An automated process of checking data and parity") the array . I synced the array after the D: drive disappeared and the app reported back w/o any errors. The SYNC policy is set to "Fix".
An overview of the RAID BIOS & the RAID GUI Is available here:
http://europe.asrock.com/manual/raid/A770CrossFire/English.pdf
Please note that I own two different AMD based MBs with the SB750 controllers for at least a couple ofyears and this is the first time I've had this kind of serious problem.
I'd love to hear more suggestions.