MSI K9A2 Platinum T3 Chip Raid 1 Big Problems

[spottedzebra]

I apologized in advance for the long post I am trying to be as detailed as possible.

I have made some upgrades from what is in my sig. I am currently running an MSI K9A2 Platinum with 2 1TB WD that are supposed to be in raid 1 (we'll get to this in just a second). I am also running win 7 Ultimate x64 on a 500 Gb WD and Linux Mint 9 on a 320 Gb WD with a dual boot set up in Linux (the dual boot is not working right now either but that is not my main concern)

Now about the raid 1 between the two 1TB WD. I have had it running with no problems, save setting it up the first time, for about 3 or 4 years now. It literally has almost everything from college on it plus a bunch on side projects on it.

The Windows installation has been having problems all summer so I decided to just reinstall today. Everything was going according to plan until Windows restarted itself during the installation process.The FastBuild raid controller built into the MB screen came up right after the system posted flashing an error "Critical Status: A disk member of the array has failed or is disconnected." I thought maybe after the Windows installation finishes it will fix the problem, nope. It is still flashing the same error. I checked the connections first thing to rule that out.

I rebooted the computer and waited for the raid controller config screen to come and hit "ctrl+F" to enter the config menu. I looked under the "View Drive Assignments" option. One 1TB drive is assigned to the raid defined as "LD 1-1" the other is assigned to "Free". Obviously, this is the problem.

I considered deleting the raid array and just building a new one in place of the current one but I am not sure what will happen. I don't want to lose all the data that I have stored on them currently.

If someone could advise as to what I should do I would be most grateful.

Thanks in advance.

[Mr.Scott]

If I'm understanding your post correctly, your array is already broken. You need to retrieve your data from the good drive, and rebuild your array, then re-install your data to the new array.

[spottedzebra]

Thanks for the super fast reply Mr. Scott.

Just to be clear because I don't have another hdd large enough to store that amount of data. I can't just delete the current array and rebuild a new one with the data on the drives; when you delete the array you delete the data too?. I really don't think it is a bad drive but I have not run any tests to confirm this hypothesis.

I am not trying to pedantic just weighing my options.

[Mr.Scott]

Correct.
Make sure you test the suspect drive before you try to use it again. You have a bad drive or a bad cable IMO.

[spottedzebra]

How would you recommend checking the disks to see if they are bad?

Also I am using a linux machine as my back up and that is what i will be running the tests with.

[Subedei]

Hello.
If you have RAID 1 (mirroring) then you will be fine. The data is written to both discs equally (for redundancy). Yo can either introduce a new drive and rebuild the array or just use the surviving Disk as a stand alone drive. This is assumng it was a hardware RAID in the first plae and not a software RAID within Windows (dynamic discs). If it was the latter then it may all go to rat****!