RAID quandry lol

[andyturpie]

I have our heads husbands personal PC here which I usually tend to from time to time. It's a Dell Dimension that was originally shipped with RAID configured, but I struggled at the time of WIN7 upgrade to install on the RAID (have not really had the experience with configs) and I am 100% certain that I broke the RAID array and had 2 physical disks.

 

 

A few days ago he called me to say that it started to slow down and was getting HDD errors etc.

 

Upon expection I have ran full HDD tests with seatools which read back full healthy drives. I have however noticed that during the RAID manager on boot it looks like the PC has been forced back into a striped 0 array and there was a red error (0) beside each drive in the RAID manager.

 

I am currently backing up the whole drive via Acronis true image and was wondering if I should try rebuild the RAID and re image or just do a fresh install and put back the files and folders from the .tib file.

 

Any suggestions please?

[Mcshammer_dj]

if this is a hard ware raid then I would use it.

[andyturpie]

Onboard Intel RAID I think via Ctrl-I command. As I have no experience, how is it possible for the drives to be Re RAID'ed (if that's the correct phrase) to a 0 array for striping but I can still access the OS? Was this down to a part configuration without formatting?

[Michael]

I think you've answered your own question really. The odds are, it isn't setup as RAID0. As soon as one drive fails, you'd lose everything.

 

You're most likely running RAID1. These are mirrored and are direct copies of each other.

 

If you can work out what RAID controller the PC uses, try installing the Intel RAID utility for Windows. This will tell you the health of the array, but also the setup of the array too.