RAID 1 Mirror degraded / split by BIOS reset

Hi there,

I recently reset my BIOS to defaults while modifying the boot order / options, and completely forgot to set my storage config for SATA back to RAID.

I have a RAID 1 mirror for work and apps / games, and this is configured on my ASUS Rampage II X58 board, using the Intel ICH10R onboard controller. This is my D drive. C is a non RAID Intel solid state drive, which is fine.

I booted into windows, and didn't notice for a while that my mirror had split back into 2 drives, D and E. I had already changed D plenty before realising my mistake. I originally thought it was a motherboard error or something like that, but I am pretty sure I reset the BIOS.

I have a backup of most of my work (all important stuff, minus some recent music work) but there are lots of programs installed on this drive too.

My next decision was perhaps a stupid one - I set the BIOS storage option back to RAID. Before booting into windows, chkdsk ran, and did a lot of scary looking stuff "deleting orphaned file" etc, then finally finished up by saying "undocumented error occurred". Reminds me of that great Mac error along the lines of ... "an error occurred because an unknown error occurred".

Windows booted up, and I had a single drive, with lots and lots of "corrupt" files. With my pants a bit stained (just kidding) I rebooted, and set things back to how they had been, disabling RAID.

Booting up again, lots more chkdsk ... (at this point I thought things were really fracked). Lots of repairing, sorting out and general positive messages.

Windows boots ... and now I have two drives again, D seems fine - programs which reported "corruption" are working, and I haven't had a single file with any errors.

The questions I have are:

Is it possible chkdsk has in fact caused some corruption which I might only discover down the line? In any case, I think I will back up all of this drive, delete the array and start again, then copy the data from the backup to the new RAID 1, and still maintain my old backup files just incase I ever discover corruption in any of the files backed up after this potential problem.

If this happens again, can I restore from a single good drive (I know RAID should rebuild if one goes down and is replaced, but it doesn't seem to have a clue what to do if you disable it, add more to the drive, then enable it again)?

It seems incredibly easy to do this, and mess up an array - too easy. But I guess if you're using RAID, it's a good idea to post big post it notes everywhere saying "DON'T RESET YOUR BIOS WITHOUT SETTING YOUR RAID CONFIG, DUMBASS!".

I should have backed up before the chkdsk, I was impatient, and stupid, but you live and learn huh?

This has made me think about whether RAID is worth the hassle, but I might thank myself one day for using it.

Thanks!

Robin

 

looks like I spoke too soon, quite a few programs just started reporting corrupt files, mainly photoshop scratch, chrome temp files. Suggests all is not well.

I guess I should try to uninstall all programs from the D drive before I start from scratch otherwise plenty of things will be left in the registry.

On with the show ...

R

 

D drive seems readable, but creating anything new or writing to existing files doesn't work. E drive content seems ok so far, but it had some chkdsk done to it too, so it's hard to say.

Rob

 

Realised that the corruptions were all being reported for temp files or files that tried to create something on the disk.

I changed Windows temp directory to use C instead of D, and set my paging file to C instead of D, and rebooted.

Now everything that previously reported corruption is running and I can't find any files that won't open, however a few programs crap out with weird errors.

Safest bet I think is to be thankful most data files seem fine, save everything I have to spare drives, recreate the RAID 1 array (although I'm half considering whether I want to use it anymore!) restore last week's backup of documents, and then piece together any other bits that I updated after that.

I obviously didn't take the right methodical steps here (impatient after years of computer problems, although I normally fix them better than this!) but it's still vexing me that it was so easy to mess up. It will make me much more careful in future anyway.