Windows 7 RAID problem

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A problem that has been haunting me ever since I installed my current motherboard (ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4) is that my two external drives, contained in a Startech ESATCASE2, which connects to a SI RAID controller card (can't remember the model at the moment), causes the BIOS to hang on the last BIOS screen, unless I remember to turn the drives off, until Windows starts booting.

I never really tried to solve this problem before, but the longer I deal with it, the more annoying it becomes. Not sure, but I think the problem is because the external drives are set to run separately as non-RAID drives, and the BIOS is looking for RAID instead.

I'm thinking of two possible means to solve the problem...either configure a RAID system that combines the two drives as one, but with two partitions, or to find an external SATA controller with two ports, that has no raid within it.

I don't remember if my RAID controller has the ability to do it, but I vaguely remember something about a configuration that does nothing more than to connect two drives as one, but I would imagine that even if I could, to configure it in that fashion now would be destructive, and I would lose all of the data now on those drives, which I shall not do.

That seems to only leave the possibility of buying a new non-RAID controller. I did some shopping for one back quite some time ago, and as far as I recall, nothing quite fit the bill. Does anyone know of a card that would solve my problem?

 

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That may be where it is, but the listings are somewhat cryptic to me. It lists 5 ATA channel 0s, 5 ATA channel 1s and 2 standard AHCI serial ATA controllers, of which only 1 is currently connected and 3 standard dual channel PCI IDE controllers. Maybe it is there, but I'm uncertain.

 

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I just double checked the Device Manager on the HTPC, and it does show the SI 3l32 SATALink card listed in Storage Controllers and it isn't raid. That is why I supposed that the MaxPower card would be listed there also. In the end, all that matters is that it works though.

 

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Another episode of my hard drive follies. This has nothing to do with a RAID controller, but the Silicon Image SataLink controller that this drive was connected to may have been part of the problem. I'm posting this because the topic is close enough to this one that it didn't seem to merit a new thread.

After cleaning and doing some minor repairs on my HTPC, neither of my external drives appeared on the SI BIOS screen, and when I attempted to play a movie from one of the drives, everything froze and I had to do a forced restart. Subsequent attempts to play movie files met with the same results. I then tried a video file from the other drive and it played okay, until I tried another and it caused everything to freeze as before.

Wanting to cross check, I swapped the drives out to my desktop, and found that the MaxPower card saw both of them as it should have, and all of the monitors and diagnostics saw them both properly, except Disk Management. It sees the drive, but doesn't list any drive letter or other data as it should. Even though DM didn't say anything about the drive needing to be initialized, I clicked the context menu on it to see if I could add a drive letter to it. That resulted in the error dialog below. I tried to refresh and reboot as suggested, but that error continues to pop up.

Acronis DDS does see the drive's letter and disk information, but I didn't want to mess with it until I better understood the situation, for fear of messing things up further.

I ran a benchmark and error scan with HD Tune, and while the benchmark was "okay", it did drop off a bit more steeply than before, and the seek time was longer, and I think the CPU Utilization was higher also (see below). The error scan produced no bad sectors, and the speed map was typical with no slow blocks. However when I selected for HD Tune to scan the files, it said that there were none (of course the file managers don't see the drive at all, since it doesn't seem to have a drive letter, as far as Windows is concerned).

I have a hunch that the controller card went on the fritz and took the drive down with it, but now I'm trying to figure whether the drive is usable and whether I can salvage the data on it, before doing anything destructive...any ideas?