Lost RAID after boot

Yesterday I have shut down my computer (running Vista x64). This morning, the computer does not boot and the RAID matrix no longer exists. I have two identical 500gb HDD, which were working fine for about a year. The hard drives appears in Intel Matrix Storage Manager, but as single drives. I have done nothing with the BIOS or Intel Matrix Storage Manager. The RAID was RAID 0.

What could it be the problem and how can I solve it?

LE:

I have rebuilt the RAID matrix again with the hope that it will be stable, and yesterday Windows Vista went perfect, but this morning the OS was not found and the recovery disc says that the HDD is not formatted. This must be a problem with one or both the hard drives. I will delete the matrix and scan them with the producer programs.

machineaddict

Posted 2012-06-08T13:35:33.403

Reputation: 85

Could you check in your BIOS settings and make sure you're still in RAID mode, and not IDE or AHCI mode? There's the possibility your settings were lost and restored to factory defaults (possibly caused by the CMOS battery dying). – Bob – 2012-06-08T14:29:14.867

the hard drives are still in RAID mode. Nothing changed over the night, but the BIOS does not see the RAID matrix. The battery is fine. – machineaddict – 2012-06-08T14:33:08.870

If a bad block or data error develops where the RAID info is stored on the drive, that'd do it. Have you tested the individual drives for data/surface errors (ie: using something like SpinRite)? – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2012-06-08T23:52:43.953

I will test the hard drives with SeaTools for DOS from Seagate website. – machineaddict – 2012-06-09T08:35:15.580

The hard drives are fine. – machineaddict – 2012-06-10T06:38:27.640

Answers

I have discovered the problem. Apparently, the video card (GeForce GT240) is causing the problems. I never thought that a video card is being able to write on HDD. The "story" is like this:

I was the first owner. The computer was installed with Windows 7. After 2 weeks it crashed the RAID 0 matrix. The video drivers were the latest. I scanned the memories with Memtest, hard drives with the producer tools. I have installed with diferrent versions of windows: Windows XP, Vista and another 7. I have changed the followings: hard drives, RAM memories, optical drive, motherboard. They all crashed in different ways after a maximum of 3 weeks.
The second owner, a friend (this topic was opened for that) took the video card for testing. For him, it crashed the computer 3 times by now. His computer was working fine for about 3 years, until I gave him this video card.

The big question is: Can I disable writing data on HDD by this evil video card?

machineaddict

Posted 2012-06-08T13:35:33.403

Reputation: 85

RAID 0 stripes any data written to it across both drives which is great for performance but is a problem if one of the drives fail or has errors. It has no redundancy or ability to recover from a drive failure.

Sounds like one (or both) of your drives has failed which unfortunately means the entire RAID 0 matrix won't work. Hopefully you have a backup.

Brad Patton

Posted 2012-06-08T13:35:33.403

Reputation: 9 939

The hard drives appears intact, they are green in Intel Matrix Storage Manager and I can rebuild the matrix, but I don't want to, because I know there is no turning back. I'm still thinking there is a way of recovering the matrix. This happened to me once before on another computer, I have rebuilded the matrix and reinstalled the OS. Those HDD were fine. – machineaddict – 2012-06-08T14:31:42.180

When I was running two drives in an Nvidia RAID 1 matrix years ago I would constantly have to rebuild the array because one of the drives would be out of sync. But it would boot and just have to recopy files from one drive to another. Is this RAID separate from your boot drive. How are you seeing green in the Intel Matrix SM. – Brad Patton – 2012-06-08T14:51:53.050

Green means that I can see them as separate disks in Intel Matrix SM and are indicated with green as viable hard discs for RAID. I'm just rebuilding the matrix. Btw, your hard drives were RAID 1, mine are RAID 0. – machineaddict – 2012-06-08T14:59:48.277

Yeah sorry that was my point (didn't make it very well) I had to rebuild the array but wasn't worried about losing data because it was RAID 1. Is the Intel Storage Manager a Windows App or in the BIOS? – Brad Patton – 2012-06-08T15:03:09.550

Is in the BIOS. Anyway, I have rebuilded the matrix and now I'm reinstalling the OS. I hope this doesn't repeat itself. – machineaddict – 2012-06-08T15:04:52.667