HELP pls with RAID-0 won't boot

[pszilard]

I was seduced by the need for speed and made my Windows 7 boot on a RAID 0 array, that was created by the motherboard's Intel Matrix chip set. When installing Windows 7 (64bit Pro), it recognised the striped array and installed perfectly.

I have now tried to find a backup solution. First off I tried the latest Acronis True Image Home 2010, but it kept hanging, so I uninstalled it. Then I tried Windows's own imaging program. I created a Rescue CD and then an image to another 1TB internal drive. But due to various limitations of the Windows program I kept looking for something better, so I thought I'll try Paragon.

Installed Paragon, but when I tried creating a Snapshot space it said it ran out of memory. Strange as I have 6GB. I tried again, and this time it said Reboot.

However it had damaged the boot loader, as it just gives the following:

Drive 0: primary 00 Vista/2008/7 NTFS System Res

in these stupid colors!

At the bottom of the screen it says:

-{ Quote: "Insert startup disk in floppy drive and press F2 to run setup." }-

I do NOT have a floppy drive, and I get to this screen even though I select the CD to boot from. Both the original Win 7 CD and the Recovery CD give the same result.

I am DESPERATE! Please help!!!

[pszilard]

Well, I had tried booting off the Windows 7 Rescue CD at least 4 times without luck.

So I prayed to God and asked Jesus for help and tried another boot. This time it gave me the option to restore! I chose Yes but didn't tick the Reformat option. Took only about 5 to 10 minutes and then asked to reboot. It all came back as before! Hallelujah! 100% success.

I can go to bed now (it's 12:45am). I feel like I lost 5 years of my life in nerves energy - Glory to God!

[gregmowad]

Just curious, what if I have a RAID-1 configured system and one of the drives fail. How would I get the replacement for the failed drive back in sync?

Do I still need to make an image backup or does raid take care of that?

Thanks!

[Wigman]

I had the same boot problem with my RAID 0.

Here's the link's to my threads: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=263658

And:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=264015

You just need to update the Master Boot record and you'll be able to fire the RAID up again. I recently copied my RAID 0 to a single drive and booted from it but had to update the MBR before it would work. Then had do it once again when I plugged my RAID back in. I unplug my cloned drive before I reconnect the RAID cuz I read it could get tricky if you leave them bith plugged in. I could be wrong about though.
Paraon uses Windows Preinstallation Enviroment 2.0 "PE 2.0" which only recognises 32 bit drivers. So if you're on a 64 bit system and it ask's to restart then it won't work when it reboots because it doesn't seee the RAID. If you need to restart for a particular function then you'll probably need to do it outside the OS with the Paragon advanced recovery CD which operates in Win PE mode. In that mode you can load 32 bit drivers so it see's your RAID and you can perform any task while your OS is basically asleep. It's easy to work with once you do it a couple times.

Hope that kinda makes sense.

[Paragon_MattK]

Just to clarify some of these questions, this is a known issue with Windows 7 x64 bit and the version 09 of the software and occurs during the reboot process required to access Paragon "blue screen" mode in Windows 7 x64, the result is a corrupted MBR. To fix the issue, repair the MBR, you can use either of our recovery CD's, using the boot corrector option. Alternatively you can use the Windows 7 recovery disk's startup repair which will correct the MBR as well.

To avoid this issue it is highly recommended that you use either of our recovery CD's to perform any operation that will require a reboot in Windows 7.