RAID1 Rebuild

[NYCBiker]

I am running Win10 and trying to rebuild a 2TB RAID1 configured with RST.

Is it possible to rebuild from the computer's BIOS set-up menu? The menu currently states that the RAID1 status is "Verify" -- see attached photo. However, I don't know whether it's actually rebuilding. The machine has currently been sitting in this status for about 14 hours, so I don't want to waste more time in vain if RST can't rebuild from this state.

A problem is I have my Win10 OS on a SSD and the user data on the RAID1. As a result, due to broken RAID1, I am unable to get any further than then login screen, so I cannot run the RST program from Windows to verify the progress.

If the RAID1 won't rebuild from the BIOS set-up, would it run from the Win10 login screen? (Unfortunately, the computer is set to sleep every hour, so I'd need to keep waking since I can't login to change the setting, but that's manageable if it will get the job done.)

If the rebuild won't happen at the Win10 login screen, is there a recommended work-around? (Three ideas I have in order of the amount of pain/time involved are: (1) rebuild the RAID1 on a different machine, but I don't know if that would present compatibility issues, (2) install Win10 on a new SSD on the same machine just to rebuild the RAID1, or (3) copy the data off of one of the RAID1 drives and create a fresh RAID1 and then transfer the data back onto the RAID1.)

By the way, how long should a RAID1 rebuild take for 2TB drives?

Thanks in advance for any input on my situation.

[JosueO_Intel]

Hello NYCBiker,

Thank you for posting on the Intel communities. In order to have a better understanding of the issue, please share with us the following information: 

1. Does any of the drives show the "Failed" status?
2. Were the steps in our article "How to Rebuild the RAID1 Volume" followed to perform the rebuild?

Also, please be sure to be running the latest BIOS version for your system. 

Regards, 

Josue O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[NYCBiker]

Josue,

Thanks for the reply. To answer your questions, (1) no, neither drive had failed -- both were good and (2) partially, my BIOS (MSI Z590 Pro Wifi) seems to be set-up differently or knew that the drives were good and the RAID needed to be rebuilt, so I didn't have the options available to me that were mentioned in the directions.

That said, I was able to figure things out. I thought I would pass along some things I noticed and/or worked for me.

First, I'm almost certain RAID does not rebuild while sitting in BIOS. It's unclear whether RAID will rebuild at the Win10 login screen; I believe the answer is no.

Second, my solution was to (i) install Win10 on a new SSD, (ii) install the Mobo drivers, including the Intel RST driver (iii) install RST software. Once I did these, the RAID drive was discovered and I ran the RST software and could see the rebuild was at 3%.

Third, the RAID1 rebuild was taking about 1 minute per 10 MB to restore my 2TB drives. It seemed to go faster towards the end. I ran chkdsk twice and everything has been restored.

I had some further struggles getting everything to work. The backstory is my old Win10 machine had the OS on an old SSD on drive C and the User Data on the HDD RAID1 on drive D. I had set-up a new machine and transferred the old drives to it. Since the old Win10 set-up on the old SSD didn't have the new RST drivers installed, it didn't see the RAID, so there was no drive D. And Win10 wouldn't let me login to install the drivers in that state without a drive D. (I confirmed the missing RAID by booting into the command prompt and running DISKPART to see the RAID was seen on the new SSD with the OS with new RST driver, but not seen on the old SSD with the OS without the new RST driver.) Luckily, by chance, when I installed both the old SSD and the new SSD and booted into the old OS using the old SSD did Win10 substitute the new SSD for the missing RAID to replace drive D. Apparently in my set-up Win10 needed to see drive D to allow a user to login. But once it had a drive D (basically, any drive D), Win10 was able to rebuild the missing user profile using default settings. No with Win10 loaded, I installed the missing drivers. As soon as I installed the RST driver, the RAID was seen and I could finish with my set-up by assigning the drives their correct letters, removing the new SSD and rebooting. After some tweaking, everything is running well.

Thanks.

[JosueO_Intel]

Hello NYCBiker,

I am glad to hear that the issue is now solved and everything is working fine. Thank you for sharing the steps you took to solve the issue and for sharing more valuable information with the community. 

If you need any additional information, please submit a new question as this thread will no longer be monitored.

Regards, 

Josue O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician