General Discussions

[kelement]

I recently built a Threadripper 3960x/Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master machine.

2x M.2 - RAID 1 (Mirroring)

2x SATA - RAID 1

I got a BSOD in Win10 while tweaking some (mild) OC settings.

Machine restarts. It doesn't go into Windows anymore.

Check bios, both arrays are gone. All the drives are present. Strangely, all other settings seem fine. Nothing else has reverted.

I have put in another drive and booted into Windows, but I can't access the data on any of my mirrored drives. They show up as unused space in Disk Manager.

If I just add these drives back to arrays in RAIDXpert2 in bios, will I lose all my data?

After carefully poking around in RAIDXpert, I think I can make a new mirrored array and add the disks. And it won't make me initialize first.

[Nerevar]

since you got a broken RAID1 array, you should back up your data from one drive before rebuild the array. It's very likely, that the rebuild will erase all data on both drives.

In general:

- RAID1 array is no replacement for data back-up. RAID1 delivers redundancy, no security.

- Software RAID is newer as good a hardware RAID. You're problems are the best example.

- you are overclocking a system running RAID1?  Those two things should not happen in one system. You should think about adding an external NAS to your network, e.g. with build in hardware RAID1 oder RAID5 for future upgrades of the volume.

[kelement]

As I said, I cannot access the drives in Windows. They show up as blank space.

As for the totally useless lecture about the nature of RAID arrays and backups, I have about five different backup schemes.

I have encountered an extremely unlikely scenario where I just built a machine, have some small amount of important data on it, and suddenly lost both drives at the same time, before all those backups could run. You are not helping the situation. Thanks anyway.

[Nerevar]

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@kelement wrote:

If I just add these drives back to arrays in RAIDXpert2 in bios, will I lose all my data?

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that was your question, I answered with "yes, you will very likely lose the data"

whether you like my "lecture" about software RAID or not, it's still true. In case of a Gigabyte motherboard with Dual-BIOS, overclocking may result in automaticly changing from Primary to Secundary BIOS (after failing to boot 3 times). Maybe your BIOS just switched. And your BIOS configuration was stored in the other BIOS.

[kelement]

Your lecture about using mirroring as a backup is totally unwarranted. I do backup my data, more than almost anyone. The purpose of a mirrored drive is to avoid down time in the event of a drive failure. This is exactly what I'm using it for.

I worked in computer shops for eight years of my life, and in IT for fifteen. I have been running mirrored drives since the early 2000s with overclocked machines. This is not common. I've never heard of this, and there are zero posts from anyone else with this experience anywhere. Whole partitions suddenly vanishing from eight drives at once is not normal. This is an exceptional situation.

My bios has not reverted. As I said in my first post, all settings have remained.

[kelement · Accepted solution]

I made new arrays with the drives with the exact same settings as before and everything came back. Here are the details for posterity from the 133-page PDF (not the 8-page one) under Help > User Guide: