Rapid Storage Technology
Intel® RST, RAID
2055 Discussions

drive changed to "Non-RAID Disk". How to correct?

GMeer1
Novice
7,613 Views

When I reset my BIOS settings, I did not notice that it changed my disks to ACHI from RAID. When I booted up into Windows 10 I noticed that the raid was missing. When I changed the SATA drive setting back to RAID and rebooted, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Option ROM utility reported that 2 of the 4 disks in my RAID-5 Volume were now set to "Non-Raid Disk". How cah I change the 2 disks back to RAID volumes without damaging my RAID 5 Volume?

My system reference is 0323 2360. For the rest of us, the configuration is as follows:

ASUS Z87-Plus Motherboard

Intel i7 4770K CPU

2 Crucial Ballistix 4Gb Memory Modules

6 SATA III Hard Drives:

1 Hitachi Deskstar 7k.1000C 1Tb Drive (C volume)

1 Western Digital WD10EACS 1Gb Drive (For future Fedora install)

4 Seagate Barracuda 2000 ST2000DM001 2Tb Hard Drives (Intel RST Raid)

I am running Windows 10 Pro.

The system was running fine until I reset the BIOS to overcome some errors windows was picking up from some incorrect over clocking setting. I reset the BIOS, ans, as I stated above, failed to notice that the ASUS UFEI BIOS (American Megatrends Build 2103), under the Advanced Settings / SATA Configuration page had changed the "STATA Mode Selection" from RAID to ACHI.

When I went in and changed the SATA Mode Selection back to RAID and rebooted the system, the Intel RST utility listed 2 of the 4 drives in my RAID 5 volume as "Non RAID Disk".

The only other setting that has been changed from the default in the BIOS has been to set the drives as Hot Swappable.

Windows can not start the RAID (No surprise as it thinks 1/2 of the drives are missing), and lists the missing drives in the device manager, and the Disk Management listes the drives as being present, and uninitialized disks (and want to know what kind of partition style to use to initialize the disks).

How can change the 2 drives back to RAID drives, and get my RAID 5 back up and running?

5 Replies
AP16
Valued Contributor III
5,414 Views

The only safe method is to bring all 4 disks to commercial HDD restoration center, they can raw-read disks and construct a volume with full copy of data on spare HDD(s) using special programs. BTW, configurations of an even number of disks in RAID-5 is not recommended at all, including reason of what happened with you (danger of 'array split').

GMeer1
Novice
5,414 Views

I can hardly believe that there is no simple way to change a label or something to get the system to recognize it's own drives. Nothing has changed on the drives that I know of. I don't know how RST recognizes it's own drives, but this so far is the worst situation anyone's RAID software has put me in. I feel so screwed by using the Intel software that came with my motherboard. If all it takes is a BIOS change back and forth from raid to destroy a system, how did Intel let this into production? And BTW, does no one at Intel follow this site? I expected that someone from the group that developed RST would have seen this and looked into this problem by now.

GMeer1
Novice
5,414 Views

It is quite odd that you state that an even number of disks can be problematic, as the commercial RAID systems that I have supported had 30, 60, and 80 drives, respectively, and non of them ever had a problem along these lines.

AP16
Valued Contributor III
5,414 Views

garymeer

That was RAID5 arrays with such numbers? More likely RAID-10 or 50. Even numbers in plain RAID-5 not recommended mostly for performance reason, cause we have a parity part and I/O page sizes are power of 2, so there is a risk that end of IO will require writing two stripes instead of one.

0 Kudos
Cesar_B_Intel
Employee
5,414 Views

Hello garymeer,

As JFFulcrum stated if you want to make sure you save all your HDD's information you will need to take your disks to commercial HDD restoration center.

On the other hand, you are able to restore the RAID 5 with four HDD's by changing the BIOS setting to SATA> RAID Mode. and reinstalling the Operating system in A Raid ready system.(All information will be lost on the HDD's) In order to complete this task you could try the "Ctrl"+"I" key combination at the POST screen in order o set the RAID configuration again.

You may find these articles useful:http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-021234.htm Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — System Will Not Boot to RAID Volume and http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-032714.htm Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — Troubleshooting RAID Volume Issues

Regards,

Caesar B.

0 Kudos
Reply