RAID/ reformat problem (HPT372)
Hi,
I was setting up a new RAID-0 (with 2 new drives) on my old KR7A-RAID board so before doing this I decided to RAR my stuff to a 3rd drive which contains 2 partitions. After doing this I took the existing RAID drives out and dropped my new drives in and disconnected the 3rd drive while I did a fresh install.
After Win2k was installed (Win2k Pro - I don't have XP), I plugged the 3rd drive back in and on the next boot it came up with that screen you get when you tell it to scandisk on next boot - anyway it had trouble with security descriptors on the 3rd drive and was reindexing files for some crazy reason. When in Windows, I could unrar all files on the 1st of the 2 partitions of the 3rd drive but not files on the 2nd partition. I tried using the repair option in WinRAR but no go. Now that is a really really big problem cause I had very important stuff on the 2nd partition but not the 1st!
So my question is can I re-plugin my old RAID straight or do I have to do something in the HPT bios to tell it a RAID is connected? What I am hoping is that the old OS will reindex the files on the 2nd partition back to how they are supposed to be. Either that or any security on the files will be negotiable on the OS that created the files and formatted the drive and so on. Worst case, I can use some drive utilities to recover the data I deleted after I rared it.
Anyway, thanks in advance for any responses...
Shiv
Ps FYI The drives are as follows
Old RAID - 2x 120GB WD JB's
3rd drive - 200GB WD JB - formatted to 2 roughly equal partitions
New RAID - 2x 200GB WD JB's
I was setting up a new RAID-0 (with 2 new drives) on my old KR7A-RAID board so before doing this I decided to RAR my stuff to a 3rd drive which contains 2 partitions. After doing this I took the existing RAID drives out and dropped my new drives in and disconnected the 3rd drive while I did a fresh install.
After Win2k was installed (Win2k Pro - I don't have XP), I plugged the 3rd drive back in and on the next boot it came up with that screen you get when you tell it to scandisk on next boot - anyway it had trouble with security descriptors on the 3rd drive and was reindexing files for some crazy reason. When in Windows, I could unrar all files on the 1st of the 2 partitions of the 3rd drive but not files on the 2nd partition. I tried using the repair option in WinRAR but no go. Now that is a really really big problem cause I had very important stuff on the 2nd partition but not the 1st!
So my question is can I re-plugin my old RAID straight or do I have to do something in the HPT bios to tell it a RAID is connected? What I am hoping is that the old OS will reindex the files on the 2nd partition back to how they are supposed to be. Either that or any security on the files will be negotiable on the OS that created the files and formatted the drive and so on. Worst case, I can use some drive utilities to recover the data I deleted after I rared it.
Anyway, thanks in advance for any responses...
Shiv
Ps FYI The drives are as follows
Old RAID - 2x 120GB WD JB's
3rd drive - 200GB WD JB - formatted to 2 roughly equal partitions
New RAID - 2x 200GB WD JB's
0
Comments
I think you had trouble because the new install sees the previous OS on the 3rd drive so I'd disconnect it before you start the installation.
As for the 3rd drive, it was not connected when I installed the OS on the new array. I reinstalled on the new array then later I connected the 3rd drive. The 3rd drive had no OS stuff installed on it at all. It was just an NTFS volume partitioned into 2 parts with lots of files on it (not installed programs or anything like that). 3 rar files on one of the partitions got reindexed by Win2k when booting and that seems to have corrupted them - never seen that before and I'm kind of glad that it only did it to 3 of them and not the ones on my other partition.
oh sorry, I re-read your original post and realized that I missed the part when you said it was disconnected.
hmmm..., I've never seen W2k do that but then again I don't use winrar. I ghost a backup image of the files I want and once the new install is done I restore the image.
You should try Ghost, it works like a charm every time.
I plugged in my old RAID and the HPT bios worked without any configuration required. The files on the 3rd drive were suddenly fully accessible so it must be something to do with NTFS file security that is blocking access on the new install. I tried setting permissions for everyone to have full access rights to the partition but that didn't work. I must be overlooking something somewhere. The 2nd partition on the 3rd drive strangely had different security settings to the 1st partition.
Only thing I can do now is to transfer the files to other computers, (by booting using the old RAID drives) unless I can work out why the security is going nuts.
Cheers for the help! Nice to know this thing actually gracefully handles a switch of drives. I'm most impressed