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RAID lost after BIOS update

LordCas98
Level 7
Hi,

I am NOT a gamer, but I have the following:

Rampage IV Black Edition
Intel i7-4930K CPU
64GB DDR3 1600 RAM
1 X Samsung EVO 500GB SSD (OS drive)
1 X Samsung EVO 250GB SSD (VHD drive)
4 X 2TB Westies in a RAID5 configuration giving 5.4TB of HDD (DATA drive)
1 X DVD-RW
1 X Blu-ray 3D Burner

🙂

Now, the BIOS version was 0403 so I figured I would update it to 0602. What I didn't do was a full backup of my DATA drive, the last backup was March 22.

After I did the BIOS update, I lost my entire RAID configuration. After trying to reboot in case it was just a glitch, I was forced to rebuild the RAID and I lost ALL data on the drive. 100% of the data was gone.

This is just a warning to backup any RAID setup you have or you may lose it all..

So, here comes a long day for a 1.8TB restore over USB3.... 😞


Casper.
8,065 Views
4 REPLIES 4

LordCas98
Level 7
An update.

Now getting 1 to 5 MB/sec copying back the 1.8TB of data. Even with the HDD connected directly to a SATA port and not on the USB3 HDD chassis.

So, looks like I also have to rebuild the entire Windows 7 system as well.

Casper.

You didn't lose RAID what happened is that when you flash the new BIOS it reverts back all the settings to stock. All you needed to do was change it back from AHCI mode to RAID and it would of worked. I know this because this happened to me.

NEOAethyr
Level 7
What Armando Ferreira said is correct.
You just needed to set it to raid mode again.

If you installed windows again after that though you're kinda screwed.
Well, kinda, there is a fix, you have to manually zero out the boot loader that got put there by the new windows install so the raid rom will detect the old boot loader, you may have to manually swap the cables around to force it to detect it.
I spent around a week or 2 working on this, horrible nightmare lol.
Good ole' winhex and testdisk saved my butt.
Lost a few exe's though lol.
But most of my stuff was intact.

Mine wasn't from updating the bios, it was trying to install windows 32bit, the driver on the site is bad for 32bit (it just doesn't work, I eventually found another...).
Windows complained, I didn't care, just thought it odd, my ssd isn't in the array anyways so I went ahead.
Windows wrote a new bootsector on my 2nd raid drive (it had no business doing so...), screwed over detection of my raid rom, lost everything, years of work.
I only figured it out when I was manually looking for files I needed to copy with winhex, by hand, looking for file headers and footers.
That's when I noticed my drives were backwards, the header was 64k after the 1st chunk of data, only noticed that when I recoverd and avi that have it's data swapped.
So I byte swapped it, worked, got the idea to zero out the 1st 64k in the array, and then manaually swaped the cables, and bam, raid rom detect the drives correctly.
Then it was up to testdisk to recover it.

Very freakin scary.
4tb...

emaratee
Level 9
My experience,

Setting RAID back in BIOS will not fix the problem even if he did not tamper with Windows.


What I usually do, before any BIOS update is to disconnect the RAID disks. Then carry out the BIOS updates, later reset parameter in BIOS back to RAID, Reboot and after that re-connect the RAID disks back.