Question RAID Problem - Intel RST not recognizing Raid drives

[bgilmer]

Bit of a problem, bear with me through the preamble or skip to the next paragraph. I have an MSI Motherboard with Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID capability built in. I set up a RAID array of 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration. All was working great for a couple years. Last ween I needed to replace a card reader that went bad on my and in the process something happened to the board and I started getting a USB Overcharge error. I worked with MSI to resolve the problem but ended up having to take it to a local shop to get it fixed. Before taking it I unplugged the SATA cables for all my drives. I got it back working and plugged in my drives. The RAID volume is not showing up. I go into the BIOS and set if for RAID (it was set to AHCI) and no I can see the Inter Rapid Storage Technology Screen...

When I go to the Inter Rapid Storage Technology screen on boot up it shows the 4 drives that make up my 4 disk RAID volume. Two of the drives are shown as members of the Raid Volume (Member Disk 0) but the other two say they are "Non-RAID Disk". I have them plugged into SATA ports 1, 2, 3 &4 because MSI only supports RAID on SATA ports 1 through 6 on my motherboard. My Raid volume says it is FAILED, I assume because more than one disk is not there. I believe the drives are physically fine, I cloned each drive before I tried doing anything. The cloning was fine with no bad sectors. I have moved the drives around internally to other SATA ports thinking that maybe they needed to be in the same ports they were in originally but this did not seem to effect which drives were members of the volume and which were reported as Non-RAID Disks. I think that I just need to figure out how to get Inter Rapid Storage Technology to recognize these drives as part of the RAID Volume. MSI has not been any help and Intel does not seem to really support this, at least I haven't found a way to get support for this from them. Even the pages to submit a ticket don't work.

Has anyone run into this before? Suggestions? Thanks in advance, this is causing me to lose sleep...

 

[rgd1101]

test with another exact model of the motherboard?

 

[bgilmer]

I suppose that is an option, though I am not sure where to get another exact motherboard as this one is discontinued. The strange thing is that the motherboard recognizes two of the drives as being in that Raid Volume and it recognizes all four drives as being attached. Maybe I should try resetting the Bios again (power down and remove the battery? thoughts?

 

[rgd1101]

you can switch the 2 working and the 2 non working and see how they get pickup by. Right now I think the port/controller issue

 

[bgilmer]

I tried swapping the two drives recognized as part of the RAID volume with the two that are not, in every case that I move them the same two drives are not recognized as part of the RAID Volume. I am using the drive Serial number to identify the different drives. If I move the two are are not recognized to the SATA port of the ones that were part of the volume it says they are still not RAID drives.
So the drives are in SATA1, SATA2, SATA3 and SATA4. If the two drives that are shown as members of the volume are in SATA1 and SATA3 (I don't recall the exact SATA ports but this is what I see when moving them around) and I move those to SATA2 and SATA4 and put the two drives that it is saying are not part of the RAID volume into SATA1 and SATA3 it will report that the drives in 1 and 3 are not part of the volume and the ones in 2 and 4 are. So I am not sure what is going on. I agree it seems like a controller problem but something on the drives might not be matching up? I don't know. I tried resetting the BIOS by unplugging it and removing the battery hoping it might do a reset but still the same problem.