Deleted RAID now can't boot

[InfoJunkies]

Hi,

My customer's Win10 HP dv6 laptop came with an LiteOn LMT-32L 32 GB SSD card. I tried to boot this system with a Win7 HD, and the LiteOn RAID utility came up. I didn't know why the utility was showing a second HD as a RAID drive, and I stupidly made it non-RAID, even though it warned me that all data would be deleted.

Ever since then, I cannot boot my customer's main HD. The error I get is that no boot device is found, even though Windows is on the main HD. (I know the main HD is OK - I took an image backup of it before I did anything else, and restored it from that image after the RAID bollix erased it.)

I believe the SSD data got cleared. Is there any way I can restore the SSD to its original condition? If I buy a replacement SSD, can I plug and play it? Or maybe I should just try removing the SSD and go with Legacy boot in the BIOS? Thanks!

 

[13thmonkey]

Sounds to me like the ssd was acting as a cache, and it is trying to boot off the wrong drive, or the ssd held system partition (not the win partition) and you've lost that.

An option, it's a bit cowboy, reinstall win 10 to get the partitioning in right places, then restore the image to the win partition. However you need to figure out what you are going to do with that SSD and what it should be doing.

 

[JaredDM]

I'm sorry, I'm not usually one to tell a moderator that he's wrong, but I feel I must make an exception this time.

Adding data (by reinstalling the OS) to a drive, SSD, RAID, whatever, after losing data that might need to be recovered is always a stupid reckless thing to do. It's a great way to ensure that your data can't be recovered later.

Your first step should be to clone both the SSD and HDD using another computer (to preserve whatever data is still there). Then you'll want to analyze the data on both to figure out what's going on. It's possible that when the computer was last installed the SSD and HDD were assembled in a simple JBOD type of RAID, in which case you need both to get the data back with any form of file names and folder structure. Or it could be that the SSD is only being used as a hyper cache, in which case the data should all still be safely contained on the HDD.

 

[13thmonkey]

Paragraph 2, he's got an image, otherwise I would not suggest writing anything.

 

[Saga Lout]

There's no rule against challenging Moderators' advice and opinions Jared but in this case the Mod was right. Believe it or not, we are only human.

Another Mod was also right about your previous signature so why go on martyring yourself by keeping your current one.

Come back at me in a PM if you wish to.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

The image was taken through the RAID software of the disks while still in an SSD cache configuration, not of the individual disks. The data imaged was all the data stored on both the HDD and the SSD, not of the SSD alone (size matches HDD not HDD+SSD because there were blank/out-of-date spaces on the HDD where data was cached on SSD).

Restoring it to the HDD means that you won't get the benefits of caching, but you won't have lost any data, because the imaging tool saw the data as the OS did, with data from both drives mixed. I'd recommend re-enabling caching and then restoring the image to the new, combined, drive (if it can't enable caching without a wipe)

If you didn't hold an image of the combined drive taken from inside the OS, IMHO JaredDM would be entirely right. An image taken of the main HDD only (e.g. by pulling the drive and connecting it to another PC) is not an image of all the data stored on the system, and attempting to boot off it only, or roll back to it while the cache held data from a newer date, would not work.

 

[13thmonkey]

If you didn't hold an image of the combined drive taken from inside the OS, IMHO JaredDM would be entirely right. An image taken of the main HDD only (e.g. by pulling the drive and connecting it to another PC) is not an image of all the data stored on the system, and attempting to boot off it only, or roll back to it while the cache held data from a newer date, would not work.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that this might be the case, and that the hdd was removed, imaged, and a mule drive installed to boot off of win7 for whatever reasons, when this was attempted the raid screen popped up as it wasn't part of the array.

However, I'd expect that a cache should be just that, a cache, and a copy of those 'hot' files from the disk, rather than a move of those 'hot files from the disk to the cache. But a cache shouldn't be a function of raid, maybe one of those intel pieces of functionality that were created in the early days of SSDs.

 

[13thmonkey]

I'm sorry, I'm not usually one to tell a moderator that he's wrong, but I feel I must make an exception this time.

Adding data (by reinstalling the OS) to a drive, SSD, RAID, whatever, after losing data that might need to be recovered is always a stupid reckless thing to do. It's a great way to ensure that your data can't be recovered later.

Your first step should be to clone both the SSD and HDD using another computer (to preserve whatever data is still there). Then you'll want to analyze the data on both to figure out what's going on. It's possible that when the computer was last installed the SSD and HDD were assembled in a simple JBOD type of RAID, in which case you need both to get the data back with any form of file names and folder structure. Or it could be that the SSD is only being used as a hyper cache, in which case the data should all still be safely contained on the HDD.

Sorry for the slightly short reply earlier I was on my phone, I have no problem with people challenging me, it's perfectly possible that i could have missed/misread something.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

You couldn't do write caching if that was the case, only read caching. I believe those Intel SSD caches did both.

Intel Smart Response Technology was implemented as part of the RAID drivers, as it still had to happen below the OS level, before the BIOS read the MBR and started to boot.

 

[13thmonkey]

You couldn't do write caching if that was the case, only read caching. I believe those Intel SSD caches did both.

Intel Smart Response Technology was implemented as part of the RAID drivers, as it still had to happen below the OS level, before the BIOS read the MBR and started to boot.

At some point that data has to be written back surely, else you have diverging sources, and with a proper shutdown that'd be the time to do it.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Shutdown or idle time, perhaps. Most of them would have been used in laptops where 'shuts down quickly' is an important feature, so I doubt they block shutdown until it's complete.

However, even if there's no write caching or it's all flushed to disk, the read cache could still be an issue. If the read cache is from one date and the disk from another, the RAID drivers could go 'oh, I've got that section of disk cached' and pick out something that's changed (or changed back) since the cache was made. You would need to clear the caching.