A7N8X deluxe, SATA & UBER

[Nanga Parbat]

A couple of weeks ago I replaced my PATA disks with SATA's. All went
well but after a few days I needed the SATA's somewhere else and
restored the PATA's.

Now I have the SATA's back but the BIOS doesn't initialize them
anymore. When I press F4 at boot to enter the RAID utility the disks
show up but I after that I get the message: "No device detected,
utility disabled!"

Only thing I can think of that has changed is that I replaced the
original BIOS 1007 by the UBER 1007. Is it possible the UBER BIOS
doesn't handle the SATA controller correctly?

Nanga

 

[Philip Callan]

Not sure if this is related to your problem, but I believe in order
to access data off the RAID, you need to connect them to the controller
they were on in the order they were before.

Not sure though, you may want to google around some more.

 

[Nanga Parbat]

A couple of weeks ago I replaced my PATA disks with SATA's. All went
well but after a few days I needed the SATA's somewhere else and
restored the PATA's.

Now I have the SATA's back but the BIOS doesn't initialize them
anymore. When I press F4 at boot to enter the RAID utility the disks
show up but I after that I get the message: "No device detected,
utility disabled!"

Only thing I can think of that has changed is that I replaced the
original BIOS 1007 by the UBER 1007. Is it possible the UBER BIOS
doesn't handle the SATA controller correctly?

I solved it but the solution worries me even more.

It had nothing to do with the UBER. I restored the original Asus BIOS
and had the same problem.

First I have to give a little more information. The SATA's were used
to test performance of RAID0 and were still configured that way.
However, now I want RAID1 so installed only 1 disk with the idea of
cloning my PATA to it first and later make the mirror. That didn't
work.

The solution was to install both disks. On boot the RAID0 is
recognized and you can enter the RAID utility where you can delete the
RAID. After that the utilty is also available with only one SATA
installed and the disk is recognized by the OS. I could proceed as
planned, cloning the PATA to SATA, etc...

But now I have a question. What if you have a RAID0 running and one
disk fails. It seems not possible to use the other disk because it's
still marked as RAID0. Maybe you need to install a new disk. I decided
to have a test.

I configured two disks back to RAID0 and thereafter replaced one of
the disk with a brand new one hoping to config a new RAID0. But no
luck, again I couldn't enter the RAID utility.

It looks to me that if one disk of a RAID0 fails the other is useless
too. IMO that's a huge bug in the SATA BIOS.

Nanga

 

[Ron]

Hmm. Well, that's how RAID is *supposed* to function. In a RAID0 (striped)
array, BOTH drives receive ½ the data...but it happens simultaneously. This
is where the speed comes from, but naturally if you remove a drive, the
system is missing exactly ½ of the data. (And it's not "the first
half"...it's ½ of every single byte...basically.)

It's with RAID1 (mirrored) that each drive is maintained as an exact clone
of the other. THEN you can re & re one of the drives when it fails...and
when you restart, the utility will "rebuild" the array by mirroring the old
drive onto the new one.

Ron

 

[Nanga Parbat]

Hmm. Well, that's how RAID is *supposed* to function. In a RAID0 (striped)
array, BOTH drives receive ½ the data...but it happens simultaneously. This
is where the speed comes from, but naturally if you remove a drive, the
system is missing exactly ½ of the data. (And it's not "the first
half"...it's ½ of every single byte...basically.)

It's with RAID1 (mirrored) that each drive is maintained as an exact clone
of the other. THEN you can re & re one of the drives when it fails...and
when you restart, the utility will "rebuild" the array by mirroring the old
drive onto the new one.

The problem is that with one failing drive in a RAID0 setup you can't
use the RAID utility to reconfigure the other to a single non-RAID
drive. I don't believe this is what the RAID utility is supposed to
do.

This has nothing to do with data. In fact, during my tests there was
never any data on the disks. Just created a RAID0, turned off the
computer, removed 1 disk and rebooted. At that point you cannot get
the remaining drive to work at all.

Nanga

 

[Rob]

Ron wrote:




The problem is that with one failing drive in a RAID0 setup you can't
use the RAID utility to reconfigure the other to a single non-RAID
drive. I don't believe this is what the RAID utility is supposed to
do.

This has nothing to do with data. In fact, during my tests there was
never any data on the disks. Just created a RAID0, turned off the
computer, removed 1 disk and rebooted. At that point you cannot get
the remaining drive to work at all.

Nanga

I'm no expert on RAID but I gather from reading that if half RAID0 set
quits a new drive can be added. Obviously the previous data is gone but
a new RAID set can be setup. After adding the new drive, use the
"Resolve Conflicts" setting to rewrite the signatures (metadata) on the
drives. After that you should be able to create a new RAID0 set and
with your most recent daily/weekly backup (everybody who runs RAID0 does
this, No?) and fresh OS install your running again. If I had the equip
to try this I'd give it a shot. If you try this, let us know.

Rob

 

[Nanga Parbat]

I'm no expert on RAID but I gather from reading that if half RAID0 set
quits a new drive can be added. Obviously the previous data is gone but
a new RAID set can be setup. After adding the new drive, use the
"Resolve Conflicts" setting to rewrite the signatures (metadata) on the
drives. After that you should be able to create a new RAID0 set and
with your most recent daily/weekly backup (everybody who runs RAID0 does
this, No?) and fresh OS install your running again. If I had the equip
to try this I'd give it a shot. If you try this, let us know.

I guess you haven't read my previous posts carefully. It's true that
rewriting the signature would solve the problem. This can be done by
resolving conflicts or deleting the RAID or even a low level format.
But all those things or done from within the RAID utility and that's
unaccessable as long there's only one disk with a RAID0 signature
connected.

Nanga

 

[jamie anderson]

Did you fully read his post? His concern, as I see it, is that when one
drive in a Raid 0 array fails, the remaining, good drive is useless too...
it cannot be reformatted. Is that really how Raid 0 is supposed to function?

If this is true, it's stupidly wasteful, & along with the original poster, I
am concerned, too.

 

[jamie anderson]

That sounds a little ambiguous so I'm rewriting it

Did you fully read his post? His concern, as I see it, is that when one
drive in a Raid 0 array fails, the remaining, good drive is permanently
useless too... it cannot be reformatted or recombined into a new array
because the Raid controller will allow no operations on an incomplete Raid 0
array. Is that really how Raid 0 is supposed to function?

If this is true, it's stupidly wasteful, & along with the original poster, I
am concerned, too.

 

[Nanga Parbat]

That sounds a little ambiguous so I'm rewriting it

Did you fully read his post? His concern, as I see it, is that when one
drive in a Raid 0 array fails, the remaining, good drive is permanently
useless too... it cannot be reformatted or recombined into a new array
because the Raid controller will allow no operations on an incomplete Raid 0
array. Is that really how Raid 0 is supposed to function?

If this is true, it's stupidly wasteful, & along with the original poster, I
am concerned, too.

Well, I don't think it's permanently useless. IMO it's just a bug in
the Silicon SATA BIOS. If you connect the disk to another SATA
controller you can probably get rid of the RAID0 signature. But not
everyone has a spare controller at hand. I know I haven't so I can't
test that

Nanga