In the last post, I have mentioned about my unpleasant experience with the RAID controllers in the nForce chipsets. Today, I want to follow up on this issue after I have done further testings.
Rearrange Hard Drive Connections
On the A8N-E system (the one with four hard drives in RAID 0+1 mode), I found that if I connect the four hard drives in a certain sequence on the 4 SATA ports, the RAID array would become unstable. To resolve this issue, I had to switch two of the hard drives connections to the SATA ports on the motherboard. After that, the system seems to be pretty stable. Hence, if you are having a similar problem, you may want to try rearranging the connection of the drives on the motherboard.
Adding A Drive With Data
On the M2N-MX system, I had to replace one of the three hard drives with a new one even though the original hard drive is working well by itself when installed in another system. Also, another thing to note is that if you want to add another hard drive to the computer and there are data in it, then you better not connect it directly to the motherboard. If you do this, you will have a chance of losing your data as the system will attempt to add your newly installed hard drive to the RAID array which may screw up the MBR. If you happen to do that, then you may want to turn off you computer immediately. Then you can install the hard drive in a non-RAID system and boot into the Windows Recovery console (you will need Windows disc). In the recovery console, you may want to try FIXMBR to see if it can fix the master boot record of the drive so that the partitions can be accessed again.
No comments yet.