Rapid Storage Technology
Intel® RST, RAID
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RAID1 not shown in Status of RST, but in system report

SIbs
Beginner
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Dear all,

I have an SSD drive for the system (drive c) with 2 drives in RAID1 each (so 4 in total).

After I exchanged the C2032 battery in my desktop computer for transport and restarted it, the RST software was gone. No idea how this can happen. Also the RAID was not in the Bios. So I installed the RST software newly (for some reason it only let me install the RST software version 12.9.0.1001, higher version not possible to install, gives me an error message). Then I let a computer repair shop arrange the RAID in the bios again.

Now I have the situation that I can see and access both RAID drives in the windows explorer (see attached snapshot) - and I do not see 4, I see only two like it is supposed to be. But I get a warning message in RST. It seems because I can only see two of the four drives in the RST status. (see another snapshot I made).

Interestingly the RST system report (see the attached txt file) shows all four drives.

I have included info about my system configurations for reference.

Does anybody know how I can repair this so that I have 2 RAID1 again and the warning in RST disappears?

Regards

Sönke

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idata
Employee
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Hello Zauder,

Thank you for joining this Intel Community.

Based on the report attached, Intel® RST will not display the RAID volume because the SATA mode is set to AHCI. You may try changing the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID in BIOS, but your system may not be able to boot into Windows*. In addition, because the SATA mode is currently set to AHCI, the RAID structure may have got corrupted. This means that if you change the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, the system may or may not be able to recognize the RAID structure.

In this scenario, if you change the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, the best option would be to reinstall the operating system from scratch and perform the steps to create RAID 1 volume contained in this user guide.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/chipsets/imsm/sb/irst_user_guide.pdf User Guide

 

8 Converting RAID-Ready to Full RAID (Page 30).

Wanner G.

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n_scott_pearson
Super User
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While everything that Wanner has said is true, let's put things in perspective...

  1. First of all, you have a system that was running with drives in a RAID array. This tells us that your O/S must have been installed with it in RAID mode. This means that you should be able to change to mode back to RAID without losing the ability to boot.
  2. The CMOS reset that occurred caused your BIOS to reset the mode to AHCI. This is, without any doubt, a BUG in your BIOS. It should not have changed anything in the BIOS configuration just because CMOS was reset. Ignoring everything else, this issue needs to be reported to your board manufacturer.
  3. There was recently a conversation regarding a similar issue (see here: ). Paraphrasing, these guys are saying that their RAID 0 arrays were damaged by a CMOS reset. As a result, it is very important that, when you change the mode back to RAID, you check the status of your array BEFORE you boot into Windows. That is, after you change the SATA Mode (back) to RAID and you save this configuration change, use CTRL-I during the subsequent POST to enter the RAID BIOS Extension and verify the state of your RAID array. If all is ok, you can ignore my next point. If you see a problem, then your BIOS has the same issue that these other BIOSs have.
  4. In this other conversation, Wanner stated that, when he attempted to reproduce this issue using one of the Intel NUC products, he saw no problems. I conclude from this that the bug that caused this corruption is isolated to these third-party BIOS implementations (i.e. Intel's implementations do not have this bug). I further speculated that this might be a systemic issue. That is, if these three vendors implemented their BIOS on top of a common core (for example, they all used an AMI core), then the bug may be in this common core. If this is the case, a single fix will address this issue in all of these vendors' BIOSs. Further, if it is the AMI core, the fix is already known (since Intel's NUC BIOSs are not exhibiting this issue).

Summarizing, (1) you should be able to switch the SATA Mode back to RAID and boot back up, (2) there is one - and possibly two - bugs in your BIOS (and in the BIOS of these other folks boards), (3) you need to report to your board vendor that your BIOS has this CMOS Reset bug and (4) before booting, when you verify the state of your RAID array. If it is corrupted as these other users have reported, you need to report this secondary bug to your board vendor as well.

Hope this helps,

...S

SIbs
Beginner
387 Views

Dear Wanner and N. Scott Pearson,

thank you so much for this comprehensive answers - it gives me a lot of homework and I guess I cannot do this alone. I will contact my Computer repair shop and let him explain all the necessary steps and the consequences to me.

I will then post an update once I have managed to make progress.

Best regards,

Sönke

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n_scott_pearson
Super User
387 Views

Sönke,

If you would like our input on what they are suggesting, feel free to post this information here and we will do so...

...S

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