Hi JackPunt,

 

I don't quite understand what you mean about a RAID boot sector.  When you use RAID 1 (Mirror) then you would be able to boot to both drives independently after a failure occurs. 

 

You should leave the good drive in the system with RAID enabled in bios.  The drive should boot fine.  The reason the drive boots when you put it on a non-RAID is because the OS is installed intact on that one drive and the driver for the non-RAID controller IS loaded.  If the driver wasn't there then you would have seen a BSOD Stop error 0x000007b (mismatched controller).

 

If the second drive was part of the RAID 1 volume then the metadata is on that drive and it should boot on the RAID enabled port with no problem.

 

Did your system report "bad blocks" or did it report a "degraded volume" message?

Ryan, what you say "should" happen is also what I would expect.

  And hence my concern when disk2 does not boot in the raid configuration.

 

The history:

  nvraidservice was reporting "Data Access Error" (error 1006). and Raid is "degraded"

  google research indicated inconclusive value from that error.

  Dell tech support said "run the express diagnostics" (which both disks passed).

  To get both disks to sync up, i "delete" disk2, using Nvidia control panel

    disk2 shows briefly as "spare" then it rebuilds: disk1->disk2

  But the process stops at 75%; i run the full disk diags and find there are media errors there.

    so, my bad, i had deleted the wrong disk... :(

  Fortunately, the bad blocks are after C, in the "backup" volume.

Question: did the raid "delete" remove something that has not been replaced (due to hanging at the 75%) point?

 

My concern about "boot sector" is that with disk1 in the raid, the raid Bios shows "bootable: yes"

but with only disk2, the raid bios shows "bootable: no" (and SetBoot has no discernable effect)

How can I make it show "bootable: yes" with disk2?

 

Hmm, did booting disk2 in the non-Raid slot remove the raid meta-data?

Hi JackPunt,

 

I don't think that it would remove the "metadata" if you attempted booting from the non-Raid, but I could assume that in doing so, the "metadata" could have been overwritten.  I really don't think that's the case.  I'm still a little bewildered by the fact that it says "bootable: no" and it boots on the non-Raid.

 

What BIOS do you have installed on the system? and...

 

What Nvidia storage driver version do you have as well? 

My resolution:  because the rebuild from disk1->disk2 did not complete (due to the media errors on disk1),

disk2 was never really "healthy" from the RAID point of view; the 'delete' removed the "i'm a raid" and the rebuild never got to finish and write the "i'm a healthy raid" volume meta-data. 

So the raid controler does not acknowledge the disk, so disk2 does not appear, let alone appear 'bootable',

the raid ctrlr actually says: "bootable: N/A" [because the drive is not really there]

 

The solution is to delete the disk(s) from raid (again) and that allows the raid bios (mediashield bios) to bring up the "build a raid array" screen; to which we add both disks, and they get re-initialized (erased to raw); although raw, they are not 'raid' and the raid array now appears as a disk to which the Vista DVD can re-install [of course, all prior data is lost; if I had been a bit more clever, i could have copied the "backup" data to a DVD and restored from a November checkpoint] 

 

Now I will reinitialize my system, get all the updates and drivers and apps installed, and then make a new 'install.img' file that i can use instead of the base that comes from Dell; so if i ever have to do this again, i'll start with a more up-to-date baseline.

 

One note or warning: After running the Dell reinstallation DVD to reinstall Vista,

and presumably "return the computer to factory installation condition"

I find that the reinstall only reinstalls the "C" partition.

It does not attempt to re-create the other partitions that come on a new machine.

[not the "backup" partition nor the "recovery" partition]

 

Since I now have 298Bb and a blank slate, does anyone have advice on how to partition for best results?

 

 

JackPunt,

 

I wouldn't suggest changing anything now that you have the OS installed and the RAID configured.  I don't think you'd truly benefit from having multiple partitions.  Back in the day when using FAT32, FAT16 & early NTFS it could make a difference on space due to the difference in cluster sizes from 8K ~ 64K, but now NTFS is doing 4K so you get the most bang for the buck leaving the partition alone I think.