3 SSD using Raid 5 running windows 8.1, on an ASROCK Z87 extreme 6 Motherboard.
I recently had my win 8.1 crash and would no longer boot. The refresh utility would not work so I booted to my old os that was currently installed as the D drive so I could get my data before I reload. After some driver updates to my old windows 7 it started detecting my drives but they soon changed to "incompatible" in the raid bios during some rebooting. I never changed any of the bios settings other than which drive to boot to. All 3 of them show up in the windows RST software but all show an incompatible error with clearing the metadata as the only option. From what I have read so far, if you clear the metadata it will delete the data on the raid array. I have also found out that I may have inadvertently switched the Raid setting in the windows registry to AHCI somehow and since the raid 5 is the boot drive there is no way to undo this.
If anyone has any info to help restore this raid array without loosing data I would be very interested to find out how.
Thanks!
@judson :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
>Here< is a guide about how to recover a damaged RAID5 array.
By the way: It was not a good idea to select a RAID5 array as bootable disk drive containing the system drive and the boot sector.
If you were able to recover all your personal RAID5 data outside the OS, I recommend to break the existing RAID5 array and to do a fresh OS installation. This is the best way to get a properly working slim system drive without all the garbage, which you had collected within the past years (inclusive your various OS upgrades and updates).
After having broken the Intel RAID5 array by using the Intel RAID Utility, you have the options to decide
a) whether you want to create a new RAID5 array at all,
b) which OS you want to use in the future (Win10 would be a much better choice than Win8.1) and
c) onto which disk drive you want to do the fresh OS install.
Please explain, what exactly you have done within the Windows registry. Maybe you can even solve your RAID5 problem by undoing the related registry modification.
If you want to change the SATA mode of your on-board Intel SATA Controller (e.g. from “RAID” to “AHCI”), you have to do it from within the BIOS and not from within the Windows registry. Furthermore any change of the SATA mode from within a running system will give you automaticly an unbootable system, if your system drive is connected to an Intel SATA port.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Thanks for the help. I was able to recover my data using reclaiMe software and wrote the results to a portable wd drive. This was the cheapest option for me. I have had good luck and performance with the raid 5 as the c drive, but unfortunately my luck ran out on that last windows crash. I think I inadvertently deconstructed my raid array when I booted to my d drive (old win 7 load) to recover my data. During the driver install the Intel software showed a pop-up that they found the drives, but I didn’t look to see how it recognized them before I rebooted. I never thought that it wouldn’t redetect it the same way that it was set up previously. On the next boot they showed up as incompatible. I purchased a single drive that I am going to use as my c drive and will reset up my raid as my data/program drive.