RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

[alternety]

On a reboot, I suddenly had no boot drive. GA-P55A-UD7. Running OK for several months.

Boot does not find my RAID 0 drive. Win repair does nothing. I had the silly idea that when I made a recovery disk after installing Win 7 I had something useful and I was OK. Turns out, as you probably all know, all it does is get me to where I get when the boot fails. And the point of this is? Rather like the functionality of mammary glands on a male pig.

Anyway. I am seriously over my head here. I do not have a recent backup. I have an older Acronis backup; but their recovery disk seems real similar to Win 7 recovery in terms of usability to do anything useful. I continue to look at that, but it will be an old image.

Repair in win 7 will not allow going back to the last good boot. It just does not see the RAID 0 drive(s).

I have been trying to find a boot/repair disk that will let me get somewhere in finding/fixing whatever is wrong, but everything I have perused has simply been too complex to use or create. I have no clue about Linix and don't plan to learn. Even the "windows" version of one disk leaves me more confused than ready.

Is the some way to actually look at the RAID 0 array (I believe everything is there, based on the boot screens seeming to know about the drives) and make a usable backup that I can recover from. If I can get a backup of the array, can I just start over or find a way to restore from that image. I really don't want to lose everything I have done on this system since install.

I am suspicious that the cause of the whole problem is related to BCU.exe. It appears, has no rational explanation for its' existence, used resources, and is flagged as a "bad thing" on a number of sites I found. It appears to be included in something from Gigabyte. I removed it just before the reboot. Afterwards I found references saying that if BCU is removed, the machine will not boot.

Can anyone explain to me how I can go about recovering from this mess? I am seriously over my head here. Help!

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Have you already tried booting to these drives, without RAID enabled in the BIOS?

If so you will need to do a clean install no matter what, everything will be lost. If you have RAID Set in the BIOS then please go into advanced BIOS page and at the top go into Hard Disk Boot Priority and move your array to the top of this list

BCU.exe seems to be spyware/virus yes, and it has nothing to do with, nor is installed, by anything Gigabyte related. Please link me to what you found saying it is from Gigabyte, just so I can be sure, but I am 99.9% sure it is not or I would recognize it

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

It has always been the first boot device. The loader starts and win fails after showing windows starting when it can't find the rest of the disk. Is the loader outside the RAID space?

I do not believe it has been booted with the BIOS not believing it is a RAID array.

I don't remember where I found the specific references about BCU. Google and bcu should find them. That is essentially how I got there; there are a lot of hits. I found more than one reference. The software itself is not available to users. It is only provided to manufacturers of things like motherboards. It is included in utilities or something. Multiple manufacturers were listed. Most that I read before deleting it said get rid of it. After I bricked the PC, I found other references about that happening. I am going looking for those again to see if they mentioned a way to recover.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Well I asked because I had a short look around Google and only found other (Non Gigabyte) references, and I have never seen this with anything Gigabyte related. I'm not trying to cover for Gigabyte or anything, just trying to let you know I don't ever remeber seeing this from any Gigabyte software, or anything for that matter.

Yes, if you did not align and create your own partition for windows 7 during or before the install the actual bootloader is located on a 100MB hidden partition, but I am not sure if that is RAIDed or not. So your BIOS still shows the RAID array as a single disk correct, and the RAID BIOS does not show any errors for this array right?

Sounds like you might be OK maybe. Do you have this BCU.exe file in any backups or anything? I doubt this would cause a non boot but I was thinking I could help you put it back into your array so you could test, if you have it and know where it originally was located.

Have you tried the repair option, then startup repair, let it reboot and then tried it once more? Sometimes it takes twice, and both times you should load the RAID Driver, I see you tried this and it failed to see the drives. Be sure you load the RAID Driver off USB Stick before going forward with repairs.

If you try the repair again, do it twice and copy the log file to USB stick and post the log here it gives you at the end of the repairs.

Better yet!!! Please go ahead and try the repair again as mentioned above, and load the drivers this time in case that is why you had problems with this before.

Please try this to rebuild your BCD Store, I bet this might fix you right up! Be sure you load your RAID Drivers

Try method 2 here
Error message when you start Windows Vista: "The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information"

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Here is where I am at. I built a standalone boot CD using UBCD4Win. This loads a copy of XP and provides tools to poke around. It has its' own driver pack. The missing RAID array is visible and I can read and write to it. But my actual install can't. So I need to find out what is wrong with the installed system. Making a copy and restoring will most likely get me right back where I am. Can anyone point me to things I should look at on the hard disk?

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

You should rebuild the BCD as I mentioned, this is likely the issue

[alternety]

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Rebuilding the BCD will not require you to load any drivers.

As for drivers for RAID they are not a requirement either, but I would use them if you were using the Intel RAID Drivers already. Version does not matter, you can use the latest and be fine but I don't think you need to worry about a repair see below.

You want to download the Pre-Install OS drivers from here - per your os 32/64 (First or third link)
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sear...ntel%C2%AE+RST)

Since you mention your boot folder is gone this is the problem, the BCD and BCD backups are kept there, so I think if you rebuild the BCD as mentioned above you will be all fixed up in a few minutes.

Let me know if you need help on how to do that, it is fairly easy to do and only takes a few minutes

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Just a progress report. Attempt to recreate BCD failed. The booted version from the Win 7 install disk can not see any drive on the PC and can not detect an installed OS. I am proceeding to make a usb drive with all the assorted drivers for the board and trying again.

I am having an inordinate problem responding to this thread. It keeps telling me that the token has expired and to refresh the screen. I have to go back to the basic forum (not a simple refresh of the screen), find the thread, open it and then post.

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

I am trying to create a CD/usb with all the required drivers and assorted software/firmware for an installation. My intent is to make this available when the Win 7 install asks if there are drivers to be installed.

I have looked at the cd provided with the motherboard. I am not understanding the hierarchy of directories and files necessary to satisfy the Win 7 installer.

I have downloaded and expanded the drivers from online sources pointed to by this site. Can someone explain to me how to build a usb device with these extracted files that can be used when win 7 repair/install asks if there are drivers to be installed? There are many folders and files associated with each function (e.g., various RAID functions, LAN,Audio, etc). How do I make a usb/cd file to give this all to the installer. I have looked at the CD provided with the motherboard, but I am confused.

Just an additional point about this whole thing about files. There is little consistency with file naming. Sometimes it says one thing, next version calls it something else. Version numbers are not consistently included in the file name. It makes it very difficult for the average user to keep track of what is going on. It really should not be this hard. I understand various web sites make up their own names; but helping would be good.

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

I just had a thought (and a nice IPA to stimulate thinking). I am into the manyth day of trying to fix this. Nothing has worked. After getting the Acronis ISO from their web site, I was able to back up my C drive. The visible piece of the RAID array.

I got Acronis backup to work from my CD. I was able to backup my C (RAID) drive.

What if I destroyed the RAID array? Made the drives regular old drives and restored the C I just backed up. At the very least, it would get rid of the issues about some things seeing the RAID and others not. This is, of course, a one time choice. One way or another I can't get back where I am.

Right now if I use Win 7 install to got to repair and then cmd prompt, I see three partitions. With all other disk drives removed except the two comprising the RAID array.

C is a reserved space - that is probably the 100 GB set aside by the system when the RAID array was built. But it gets a letter in DOS.

D appears to be pretty much what should be on my real C.

E is a partition with a bunch of boot stuff, probably created either by Acronis or UBCD4Win.

I would appreciate some advice/analysis of this approach. Once done, there is no going back.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

OK, you may need to first load the RAID Driver before the BCD Build.

Ohh wait, so you got a backup made? Does it look normal, and you can browse around in the backup if mounted? If so then yes, you can just delete your array (Or I'd actually just format that way you leave the same exact array parameters), then restore your backup image to it.

As for your repair options drive questions, I think you are correct. From there at the prompt is this where you tried to rebuild the BCD? If so, did you change the commands to build it on C or D?

If you did not, try it now and choose to repair it onto D, if that fails it shouldn't mess anything up just add to C is all. If it fails I would try rebooting and then choose the normal "Startup Repair" option and reboot and see if it worked, if not try once more.

If that fails, then try all of the above again, this time making the BCD built onto the C partition (100MB one)

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

OK, here is what I am doing.

I have traps set in the yard to capture a small furry mammal. It may become a vital part of the recovery.

I have an Acronis backup of the broken C drive on an external USB drive. I disconnected the drives in the RAID array. I added a new SATA drive and used Acronis recovery disk to make it an active NTFS drive. After some false starts, I am, as we speak, restoring the Acronis backup to the new C drive. I expect that when this is done, I will still have a boot problem, but it will not involve a RAID array. At this point I will onec again try Win 7 recovery. I really wish I had someone here as smart as I used to be.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

Sounds like a good plan!

Sorry I am not there to help, if only I could help everyone directly!!

So now at least you have a backup, so if you don't have any luck with anything you will be stuck doing a clean install, but will still be able to get your important documents, files, ect from the backup you have.

Good luck with your plans, hope all goes well!

[alternety]

Re: RAID 0 boot drive diasppeared

I am indeed in the midst of a clean install. I tried everything but a complete rebuild of all things boot. I was trying to do that and I was having problems getting things to boot of the CD. I just bit the bullet. I have spent waaay too much time on this.