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3734
August 22nd, 2012 14:00
No boot drive
I have a XPS450 with two 500gb hard drives. I recently had a problem during boot up, after the Dell screen 'Intel Matrix Storage Manager' appears followed, after a long pause by 'No boot device available'. The first time it came up I tried restarting the PC several times, and eventually it restarted. After a few days it started doing it again, and now it won't boot at all.
I've tried plugging the drives into different ports, resetting CMOS after which I got an additional 'Battery is low' message. If I go into the BIOS one of the drives shows up, but the other one doesn't.
I don't know what the RAID setup was, its the factory setting, but I had only 640gb showing on the C: drive.
Am I looking at a dead hard drive?
briantg
79 Posts
0
August 22nd, 2012 15:00
If you had a 640GB C: Partition... and there were 2 500GB drives in the system, that means you are running a RAID-0 "Striped" configuration. The partition table, master file table, the operating system and each individual file was stripped apart across both hard drives. So, if one of the drives is failed and not detecting in the RAID BIOS your system will not boot and your data would be inaccessible unless choosing to send it off for professional data recovery services.
scrumble
2 Posts
0
August 23rd, 2012 00:00
The 640gb was off the top of my head, and relying on my memory isn't always the best :emotion-10:
I've installed ubuntu onto a usb, just so we can actually have a working PC. The first few times it was only showing the one working hard drive, as a 500gb unpartitioned drive. Started the PC this morning, and by some miracle the other drive is working.
The broken drive is partioned as 58mb Dell utility, 16gb Recovery, and 484gb OS. I've partitioned the second drive, and copied across any files that I hadn't had time to back up previously. But now I'm confused has to how it was originally setup.
1) If the drive was RAID 0 would the second working drive have shown up in Ubuntu as unpartioned, and if it was striped, with half the data contained on the second drive, how have I been able to partition it and copy everything across to it?
2) But if it wasn't RAID 0 surely the second drive should have shown up in windows as an unpartioned drive
briantg
79 Posts
0
August 23rd, 2012 07:00
I based my assessment of RAID-0 based on simply math. If you had indeed had a partition bigger than 500G and had 2x500G drives in the system they would have had to be stripped or spanned in order to achieve the capacity. With 500GB worth of partitions the math changes and there's no way it was RAID-0. If it was stripped you wouldn't have been able to do what you did, so chances are you either had a RAID-1 mirrored array or you had 2 independent hard drives set up. Typically with hardware RAIDs the motherboard is taking care of the RAID config, so it exposes the storage as one logical volume (even though 2 drives are mirrored under the covers).
It's possible the non-partitioned drive was never set up in the first place, just sitting their unallocated. Also possible it was indeed part of a RAID-1 and at some point went "stale" or 'degraded" and the RAID controller took it offline.
Either way, I think it's best that you back up all your data on drives that are unassociated with these 2. Pick up a cheap USB external drive or something.