Hard drives detected in Bios but not windows?!?!?

Hard drives detected in Bios but not windows help?!?!?

I am running XP sp1 with a 160gb main and two 80gig maxtors running raid. I suspected my raid card was causing a problem so I deleted the array and connected them to my Mobo. The computer boots up and detects these during the boot process and also device manager in windows shows them under disk drives but they are nowhere to be found in explorer. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

As they were set up in RAID the Master Boot Record probably isn't able to access them.
You may be able to fix it using hard drive utilities (I have little experience with RAID).
Using
format /mbr
you may lose your data.

If you can do without the data repartition/reformat them (Maxblast).

Matt

 

Your problem has to do with RAID drivers and/or possibly bios. You may be in need of a bios flash which includes a flash upgrade of your RAID chipset. You'll need to be more specific as to your Motherboard and the RAID device itself. I'll assume its more than likely going to be Highpoint, but you'll need to tell me. The best bet for you is to visit your MB mfg website and find out what the latest bios release is and what the revision history has corrected. These types of problems re: drive recognition will differ between Win9x, 2000 and XP, so the more info you can provide, the more I can provide with regards to help. This is not an uncommon problem.

edit: >>>> just reread your post. Will leave the above alone but it is not applicable because you have a RAID card, not a RAID MB. The MBR advice is 100% correct and you may wind up having to reformat those two drives if there was a problem deleting the array. I've had some that became so stubborn they wouldn't do anything until I slaved them in another machine and FDISKed.

You may find some success with disk management in XP and may need to import them as foreign disks.

 

More - if you do wind up having to reformat, I personally would discourage the use of something like MaxBlast.

 

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I have an abit kr7a 133 raid MB, when I disabled the raid configuration neither drive showed up, my bios and drivers are up to date. I ended up using getbackdata for ntfs to retreive the info. I am stumpted as to why this happened. When I ran powermax from maxtor I ended up with some read failures including a smart failure. I just dont want this to happen again. I figured by running raid my data would be protected, boy was I wrong, getback was only able to retreive data from 1 drive. I guess I got lucky. Thank you all for your input.

 

Understand when you run a RAID stripe, two drives become one and if you ever try to delete the array, neither drive is readable by itself. With a RAID mirror, two drives become identical and either can be removed and replaced and the mirror can be recreated with a new drive (replacement) added. Problem with a stripe is that if either drive goes south on you, you are SOL.

Your ABIT board requires the correct highpoint drivers for proper drive recognition. And, these have to matched with the BIOS. For more info you can go here and scan the FAQ's:
http://www.sudhian.com/showfaqs.cfm?fid=7

Best ABIT site on the net - spend some time here and your system will love you.

 

Something has been puzzeling me about a raid mirror array. The question is, what value has the duplication, seeing that if a file gets corrupted, it gets corrupted on both drives. Would not the cause of a system crash also be duplicated? How could recovery work if both drives are hosed by software?

Martin

 

I had my a HD go south on me Raid1. And then I messed up duplicating the raid when I replaced the drive. The second one booted as G and had everything on it. Was I shocked! Well I went back to the HPT bios and recreated the raid properly. It was all there though.

 

Like Arie said, thats the beauty of a RAID mirror.

 

Its just too bad M$ decided not to allow support for RAID 0-1 in W2k pro.

You can have 0 or you can have 1 - but not both without extra hardware. (is avail in server...)