hard disk issue

[Chroner]

I backed up some data from my gaming box today to a 500 GB disk prior to reinstalling windows and am now having some issues restoring the data from the 500 GB. Windows is having some difficulty detecting the drive correctly. The disk is showing up in disk management as a 1174 GB disk with 2 partions of 811 GB and 259 GB along with 104 GB of unallocated space. (see screenshot http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne...1784812&size=o)

Prior to reinstalling the box had 2 74 GB drives in a raid 0 and the 500 GB. The motherboard is an Asus A8N-SLI. The raid 0 was setup on the NV raid controller and the 500 GB was on the silicon image controller. I deleted the raid 0 array, moved all the disks onto the silicon image controller, and then installed XP on one of the 74 GB and was planning on moving some data back onto it, but i cant access the data on the 500 GB.

any ideas what to do?

[gplasky]

It sounds like you didn't break the mirror (raid 0) from the 74 GB drives and just moved the drives onto the SI controller. So now it sees the 500 + 74= 574 as mirrored = 1148 GB (There is probably a small hidden partition that makes up the difference.) Did you go into the RAID utility and destroy it or just delete it from Windows?

Gerry

[Chroner]

Thanks for the response.

Yes, i deleted the array in the raid setup utility prior to moving any of the drives around. the 500 GB was never part of the raid array though. it wasn't even in the machine when the raid 0 was created. infact, it was on a different controller (the raid 0 was on the NV raid controller and the 500 GB was on the silicon image). I did that intentionally thinking it would prevent me from having any kind of issues like this.

What you are saying seems to make sense though. If it is the case, how would i go about recovering the data? should i recreate the raid 0 and see if that helps? i would prefer to not have to do this as i would then have to reinstall windows (at least) 2 more times. if that is my only course of action though, i guess i dont have much choice.

[Chroner]

I also noticed an unknown device listed in Device Manager under SCSI and RAID controllers. There are 2 devices listed
"Silicon Image SiI 3114 SoftRaid 5 Controller" and the unknown device.

I'm not sure what the device is , but I tried installing drivers for it from the mobo cd, but couldn't seem to find any that windows seemed to like. I also tried using the floppy driver disks i made for use during windows install, but also no luck.

[omega]

It's possible the unknown device might be your NV raid controller. Have you tried installing the latest nForce drivers from www.nvidia.com?

[Chroner]

i tried installing from the mobo driver cd, i havent tried downloading new drivers. i'll give it a shot today

[Chroner]

No luck with the nforce drivers on nvidia's page. it doesn't complete the installation of the drivers and reports back "there was an error during installation of the device"

[omega]

If I'm understanding the situation, you have the two formerly mirrored 74G drives setup independently now and working, and the 500G which was never in an array is what's not being detected properly. If that's the case, my next step would be to either try putting the 500G drive in a different PC if you can, or connect it via USB or FireWire (if you don't have an adapter or enclosure available, you can probably "borrow" one from the nearest computer store - you can always return it later if you don't need it long-term).

If you are able to read the data that way, then there's a problem with the controller it's currently connected to (or the driver for that controller). If you get similar problems over a different connection or on a different PC, then it probably means the drive got somehow corrupted - probably in the partition table or boot sector. In that case it's not hopeless but you're looking at more advanced recovery techniques.

[Crashless]

How are these drives being reported in your POST? It sounds like your RAID controller has messed up it's reporting to windows.

I would strip everything out and hook drives up one by one, and see how the BIOS reads them.

If everything is being reported correctly in your BIOS, you can always try booting a Ubuntu or GnuParted CD to check the partition tables. That would let you know if your windows install is screwed, or if it's the hard drives.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/index.shtml
http://www.ubuntu.com

[Chroner]

@omega
yes, you have the setup correct. The two 74's were initially in a raid 0 (not mirrored) and the 500 was added later. However, i think in my initial post i was backwards. the raid 0 was on the siI3114 controller and the 500 was on the nv controller. I didn't get a chance to pull the drive out and put it in another machine yet. The only other SATA machine i have is my sage box and the wife wanted to watch TV tonight, so that was a no-go. I'll give it a shot tomorrow (hopefully).

@Crashless
If the 500 is connected to the nv controller, everything looks ok during POST. Windows boots and then i get the 1200 GB drive listed in disk management.

If the 500 is connected to the siI3114 inital POST is OK, then during the siI3114 load i get an error along the lines of "no valid device" and then it lists the 500 GB (with the correct capacity). Windows then boots and there is no 1200 GB listed in disk managment. Only the 2 74's are listed. However, if I looks at the silicon raid utility, it lists the 500 GB device. So the controller knows that it is there, windows just doesn't believe it. http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne...7860517&size=o

I don't have much (translation=any) experience in linux and without a pretty explicit list of procedures, i fear i would do more harm than good trying to play around with it.

On a side note, the unknown device i previously mentioned is no longer listed in device manager. Whereas i used to have 2 devices listed under SCSI and Raid Controllers, i now have only the siI3114 listed.

I really appreciate all of the suggestions, they have pointed me in directions i probably wouldn't have gone on my own.

[Crashless]

So far so good. Check under the "RAID Group" menu to see if you can setup a single disk volume. If it's not obvious - check the help. I'm sure there's a way to have the controller just use one disk for a volume.

Once you get that setup in the RAID program, it should report correctly to Windows, and you'll be able to format it.

Don't worry about linux - it was in case something was wrong with your partition tables and it doesn't seem like that's the issue anymore.

[Chroner]

If I create a new raid group, will that destroy any data that is currently on the disk?

[Crashless]

Hmmm....

I have no idea...so I would assume it will.

Sorry - good catch.

Do you have another computer you can move it to in order to get the data off?

[Chroner]

yes, i do have another machine that I can put it in. i'll give it a shot.

[Chroner]

I just put the drive in a second machine and windows sees the drive with the incorrect capacity and unknown partitions on it. so i guess that means that the partition table on the drive is definately not normal and somehow got hosed up by the raid controller (even though it was never part of an array).

i don't know a whole lot about the specifics of how raid works, but i guess it must write something to the disk which windows is interpreting incorrectly at this point.

is there anyway i can remove whatever it is that windows is seeing?

[Crashless]

Yikes...

Yeah, it sounds like the partition table is hosed. You might want to start researching data recovery programs if there's stuff on there you want.

There has to be utilities out there that can rebuild that for you. I don't know of any off hand though - sorry.

I can't see how it happened though. Simply connecting it to a controller shouldn't mess anything up. Usually it requires some sort of user action to write over stuff like that.

[Chroner]

thanks for all your help. i'll let you know if i have any success. fortunately, i don't have anything critical on it. so if i am unable to recover the data, im not screwed.