deleting raid mirror after GoBack crashed my system

[watsongr]

Hi,

For the past two days I have been trying to recover from a simple stupid errror. After installing Symantec's SystemWorks 2005 Premier and doing a GHOST image, I attempted to turn on SYMANTEC's GO BACK and my system then would not boot. I think it may have only corrupted my primary serial ATA RAID drive and not the secondary, because attempting to post with both hooked up (or the primary by itself) gives me a black screen almost immediately and with only the secondary hooked up I get further in the post before the computer freezes. I tried moving the secondary RAID drive to the primary slot and disconnecting the secondary altogether, attempting to boot from that. I get a bios reporting error that informs me that the RAID mirror set is not working and that I need to go into the bios. I wonder if I just select "delete mirror set" if that will then allow me to boot from this drive, assuming it is not as corrupted as the primary. I have an ASUS motherboard, A7N8X, but the documentation says nothing about this.

 

Before trying this experiment of deleting the RAID configuration in the bios I thought I would just try to restore my GHOST image onto another brand new drive. I attempted to get my GHOST image off a third drive (IDE, where I thought I had kept it safely) and put it onto another 4th (completely new IDE) drive, but when I attempt to boot off the Symantec recovery CD it goes directly into GOBACK, even without my two RAID drives connected. A friend says it does not do that normally, unless you have been using GoBack, which means that information on my third drive (perhaps in the image file itself) is telling System recovery program that I need it. Of course GoBack doesn’t work – giving me an error that says I need to reboot the computer – and thus I am caught in an infinite loop, since rebooting gives me the same error that tells me to reboot. The recovery menu never comes up because of the GoBack problem.

 

Hence, I have decided to go back to attempt to recover with my second RAID drive. I was afraid I would destroy it in the process, which is why I decided to try to restore my Image file to a brand new drive first.

HELP!!

... and thanks in advance for any help.

Greg_Watson@post.harvard.edu :(

[AWS]

Once you create a new raid config the controller will format the drives. I don't know if your controller has hotswap capabilities. If it does you could swap out one drive for the other and the controller will rebuild the array without losing data. Another option, if the controller can do this, is to rebuild the array. No data lost this way either. Removing the current array and creating a new one will mean format and total data loss.

[AWS]

Just thought of something else. I think you can boot from the GoBack CD. If you can, boot from it and use the option to disable GoBack on all drives. The computer should boot after that.

Doesn't GoBack show some sort of screen after bios post that allows you to disable hit? Hit spacebar to configure or something like that?

If it does shut off GoBack.