Help me fix a software RAID-5?

March 28, 2007 10:11 AM

I've got an nVidia nForce 570 motherboard with 5 drives (500 GB each -- 465 GB actual) in a RAID-5 array. The RAID has been working well in Vista until yesterday, when my system froze. Now nVidia's Storage control panel reports a "Healthy" array with 5 drives but with a capacity of only 465GB (rather than the expected 1.81 TB). Can this be fixed?

The system freeze happened while I was trying to install new drivers for the RAID (I was using XP drivers, nVidia recently released Vista ones, which I was trying to upgrade to).

Initially, when I rebooted after the freeze, I was unable to boot at all. I got a disk read error immediately after the BIOS screen, with the only option being a Ctrl-alt-Del. In Vista's recovery console I was able to determine that my system drive (a separate drive on a different SATA interface) was fine, and disabling the controller with the RAID on it allowed me to boot, but re-enabling it gave me the error again.

I ghosted my system drive and reinstalled Vista (with the RAID disabled). After Vista was up and running again I re-enabled the RAID in the BIOS and Vista detected it and installed drivers, but only showed 465 GB available (as noted above).

Windows Disk Management shows the drive with 465 GB available as well, with a RAW partition using the entire space.

The MediaShield RAID setup in the BIOS shows the array as "Healthy" with a capactiy of 1.81 GB, as expected.

posted by scottnic to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Stupid question, but is it still set as RAID-5?
posted by inigo2 at 10:21 AM on March 28, 2007

inigo2: Yup. Definitely still RAID-5

ASM: 1.81TB is no better than nothing if I can't use it :)
posted by scottnic at 11:11 AM on March 28, 2007

If you can find a livecd with the right fakeraid drivers, you can at least make sure that your data is still actually there using Linux. It won't help much with being able to access it, but if you have anything particularly important you could copy it off before messing with it further.

The next comment won't be helpful, but now you see why I hate fakeraid in Windows. ;)

Oh, and what ASM said.
posted by wierdo at 11:21 AM on March 28, 2007

Argh, I meant "It won't help much with being able to access it in Windows, but if.."
posted by wierdo at 11:22 AM on March 28, 2007