Mysterious crash then dynamic disk missing.

[Stanle68]

Recently woke up and found computer wouldn't post. Tried a few things including removing a stick of ram. It subsequently started up no problem. I then shut it down and put the "bad" ram stick back in to see what would happen and voila it started up fine again?

I used command prompt to flush my tcp/ip settings because of what I think is an unrelated issue and Restarted again.

Computer went into windows automatic repair loop after throwing an error code "inaccessible boot device." I couldn't figure out what was happening so I restored from an older system image I had. Windows still wouldn't boot after all that, just kept throwing the above error.

Finally was able to boot it in safe mode which makes me sad because I bet I didn't need to restore that image and lose my files on the C drive.

Now, in safe mode disk management is telling me "dynamic disk missing" in reference to my separate 2 disk raid 0 array. It gives an option to reactivate volume but does nothing when I press it.

Computer will only boot if raid is disabled in bios and changed to ahci, and then only after about a 2-3 min wait. Everything was working fine yesterday! Is this a virus, hardware failure or a symptom of system restore not assigning drive letters correctly or something?

I think I could just nuke the array and start over but prefer to understand what caused this and avoid reformatting if at all possible.

Sorry about that long story! Thank you so much

System specs
120gb pny ssd system drive C
2 adata 550 500gb ssd in raid0
1 wd blue 500gb hd
Mobo MSI fm2-a85xmaP33

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, @Stanle68!

I suspect that the issue is most probably coming from one of your storage devices but some more troubleshooting is needed to determine that. Have you tried booting the system with your RAID 0 SSDs unplugged from the motherboard, leaving only the WD Blue and your booting SSD. I'd recommend you to give it a try and see how the system will perform. Another thing you should check is your SSDs' health and SMART status, using an SSD-specific diagnostic tool. I'd also make sure you have all the SSDs' firmware up-to-date using their brand-specific utility to check that. You should be able to find on their manufacturer's official website.

Worst case scenario is resetting everything and starting from scratch but it would give you the demanded performance. RAID 0 has no redundancy, so there's no way to retrieve the files from the RAID-ed SSDs. That's why it's strongly recommended to always do regular backups when setting up such storage arrays. As for your other files & data, if you are still able to access it, you should be able to back it up somewhere off-site (e.g. an external HDD) before starting anew. Also, if you decide to do a clean install of Windows, make sure you unplug all secondary storage (leaving just the destination boot SSD and the installation media), otherwise you might encounter an OS confusion.

Let me know if you have more questions. Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD