chillibear.com
Nvidia Mediashield repair Raid 1
I have a love hate relationship with Raid controllers, why do they always make the simplest job sound really scary? The home PC has a Raid 1 array using the Nvidia Mediashield system, occasionally the disks get out of sync breaking the array, so time to rebuild… why is there not a really obvious route to do this in the BIOS. Anyhow since I keep forgetting the steps I thought I should write them down for myself:
- raid reports a degraded array - flashing red warning and two arrays show up, one containing each disk from the original single array* Identify in Windows which drive is the most up to date, now the array has failed you should see two drives again.
- identify which disk is which - they have a Port and Index number in the RAID system, I suggest unplugging a
disk and seeing which one disappears!
Now you’ve identified which disk you want to “keep” we need to delete the other array containing the ‘bad’ disk.* Since generally in my case the second disk is just out of sync and hasn’t physically failed I can re-use it. So I go to my one remaining array and select the [R]ebuild option, I pick my now spare disk (it’s spare now because it’s no longer part of an array). And presto the rebuild begins. * Wait a good few hours and we’re done.
Written on 22 Aug 2009 and categorised in Windows, tagged as RAID and Nvidia
site copyright Eric Freeman
