Asus M4A79T Deluxe and Raid 0

[bluemann]

I recently built a new system with two older hard drives. These are two Western Digital Raptor 37 GB 10,000 RPM hard drives. They're set up with an AMD Phenom II 940 processor on an Asus M4A79 Deluxe Mother Board. The raid controller is AMD via AMD Fastbuild. I set up the hard drives in Fastbuild with Raid 0. MBR for both hard drives were erased and the raid array was set up. After they were set up, the system reboot, taking me to a screen where it stated the raid array and said "functional". However, the screen just sat there for hours. Thinking the system was frozen, I restarted and the same screen showed up. I couldnt access Fastbuild via the hot keys (ctrl+f) and the screen was just sitting there. I then unplugged one hard drive and rebooted. Fastbuild recognized the one hard drive and then I finally had the option to hit ctrl+f to access the utility. Once in the utility, deleted the array from the one hard drive plugged in. I then plugged the other hard drive in and rebooted and now I get to a screen where it says the raid array is "offline" and I have no option to hit ctrl+f to delete the array this hard drive. Now I literally can't delete, set up or modify the array when this hard drive is plugged regardless if the other hard drive is plugged in or not. I'm constantly routed to a screen where it says raid status "offline", and the system hangs here. Can anyone help?

Thanks

 

[Translucency]

Connect to another motherboard without onboard RAID (or turned off) and zero-write the disks using a livecd (ultimate boot cd or some linux livecd). Existing (partial) configuration data can stall/lock up the RAID BIOS of some onboard RAID. I experienced this with Silicon Image RAID, but other onboard RAID may behave similar.

The only thing i can think of right now..

 

[bluemann]

Thanks for your help. When I turn Raid off on my motherboard, I can launch WD Diagnostics and format the hard drive. However, that didn't work. When I turn raid back on the same message "offline" appears and hangs at the screen. Any other ideas?

 

[Translucency]

Formatting does not imply zero-writing. The problem might be some residual configuration that makes your RAID BIOS crash. That's a problem i've had and the only thing to correct that is to blank/zero-write the last portion of each harddrive; that is where the RAID BIOS stores the configuration. That's the only thing i can think of.

So you really need a linux/bsd livecd / repair cd like ultimate boot cd for that.

 

[bluemann]

which program within ultimate boot cd should I be using?

 

[Translucency]

Hard Disk Wiping Tools

see:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

There are several utilities on the cd, try HDDErase for example.
I never used these as i do zero-writing within Linux, which can also be done by a livecd. To use linux for zero-writing, the following command can be used in the terminal

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/YOURHARDDRIVEHERE bs=1M

Replace the YOURHARDDRIVEHERE for your harddrive device name like "sda". Be sure to get this correct double check the command used. So should ultimate boot cd not work for some reason, you can try this method instead. If you want guidance with this method just ask so. Any livecd will do, for example from Ubuntu.