Dimension 8400 not booting after swapping mobo, raid issue

[bierce85]

Hey guys, my brother's 5 year old Dimension 8400 was having issues, turned out to be the motherboard.. so he got a refurbished one which I offered to install for him.. Anyway, we got everything back together and now when the computer starts up it says there's no bootable device.. Prior to the motherboard issue he was running a raid stripe configuration. I was wondering if anyone knows how I can get the board to see the raid.. I tried going into the bios and setting it to "raid on" and that didn't help. Thanks.

 

[aford10]

Did you create the array in the RAID BIOS?

Since you changed the mobo, you changed the RAID controller. It's likely not going to recognize the old array. You'll likely have to create a new array and format/install all over again.

 

[bierce85]

I don't really know anything about raid since I never used it on any of my systems.. how do you create an array in the bios?

Is a reformat necessary? If so, what would be the best way to save the data we don't want to lose on the old drives? I was thinking we could possibly get a 3rd drive, install windows on it, then hopefully recover the files of the two raided drives using the new drive to boot so we can just view the raided drives as regular hard drive.

 

[aford10]

The RAID BIOS is a seperate BIOS from the normal BIOS. Enable RAID in the normal BIOS. Once RAID is enabled, you will see a key stroke prompt on startup to enter the RAID BIOS (not sure the exact key stroke). Once in the RAID BIOS, you can create your array. Then you will need to boot off the OS disc. At the beginning of the process you will see a prompt to install 3rd party/RAID drivers (f6). This is where you would load your RAID drivers off a bootable floppy. Once they are loaded here, you can continue on with the rest of the windows install.

You can try just recreating the array in the RAID BIOS and see if the controller will see and be able to repair your existing array, but it's doubtful that it will. If it doesn't, your array is gone and your data is gone. That's the downfall of using a RAID array. If your array or controller fails, without a backup or parity setup, you've lost it all.