How to fix missing RAID1 drive

Question

I had to do some fiddling about with my cables inside thebox and now I am getting a "Critical Error" about the RAID disks during startup. I have a gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3 motherboard. Aparently the RAID controller is an AMD SB710 chip.

I'm pretty sure I know what happenned. The first time I rebooted I had forgotten the power cable on one of the disks in the RAID1 (mirror) and let it boot up. So I shut down and put the power back in.

So now when it boots up I go into the RAID admin interface (between the BIOS screen and the OS loading):

• it shows the RAID1 as in error the logical device has one disk and says the other is disconnected or missing
• the other physical disk shows up as a single disk

If I boot to the OS (Windows 7 32 bit) the data all seems to be there.

If I go into computer management it says my partition is on a disk and working OK. But the other disk is offline because:

"The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online"

So I am guessing because I STUPIDLY booted up with only one of the disks powered on, the other disk fell out of synch with the mirror and so now cannot rejoin the mirror.

How do I fix this? I want to get the RAID1 mirror working again. There does not appear to be any "Repair" option in the basic RAID admin tool which I get into during startup before the OS boots.

I have not made any explicit changes to the online one (but I guess the OS has probably written some admin data).

Answer 1

After reading the manual I discovered I had to download the "AMD RAIDXpert" utility from here. Using it I was able to "rebuild" the array by adding the out of sync disk back into the logical device.

Thanks for the tips @moskito-x, I did learn some stuff by following the steps you suggested.

Edit: Updated RaidX download link: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows%207%20-%2064

Answer 2

Set the automatic rebuild option

Rebuilding can occur

any time one or more members of the RAID 1 mirror set become out of sync, that is, the data on a drive doesn’t match other members of the set. When this occurs, the rebuild process will begin, assuming you selected the automatic rebuild option during the RAID 1 mirror set creation process.

In the RAID management system.

From there you can examine the RAID array, identify which of the two disks is faulty and which is still good. If there is ANY confusion here, do NOT proceed.

But there usually is a process to restore the RAID1 array by simply copying EVERYTHING from the good disk that still works to the other.

Look at the BIOS

Your BIOS port mode must be set to use RAID (not IDE Emulation, or AHCI, etc.). Set it to the same as your first harddisk.

Answer 3

I've been having a similar problem with my Gigabyte 890XA-UD3 using two Sandisk SSD's intermittently failing and breaking the RAID 1 logical drive. It was counter intuitive to "DELETE" the logical drive so you could recreate it (warning you data may be lost as well), but it does work. After years of dealing with HP/Compaq arrays and the things we've recovered from these guys could stand to take a few lessons.