Intel Rapid Storage Technology, need to rebuild to new disk

[ParanoiaDragon]

Ok, I'm freaking out a bit, my master disk recently took a dump on me, so I'm running off of m recover drive.  I bought a new hard drive & popped it in, but it's not showing up as new hardware, nor is there even an option to rebuild to a new disk!  I'm not sure if there's anything special I have to do to the new hard drive I put in, haven't had to do any of this myself in probably 10 plus years.  I've done a bunch of Googling & such, I'm not answers that are working, I'm very tired, frusterated & overwhelmed.  Any help would be flipping awesome!

In status it just says:
Array 0000
Volume_0000: Degraded
Update mode: Continuous

Details: A data recovery operation could not be completed due to a problem reported on the master disk. Fix any problems reported on the array disks to resume the operation, or rebuild the volume to a new disk.

Master disk on port Unknown: Missing

In Manage Disk is says similar stuff:
Port: Unknown
Port location: Unknown
Status: Missing
Usage: Master disk
Size: 0 MB
then it gives the serial number, and the rest is blank from there....

[ProfessorProfessorson]

Running a Raid setup?

[ParanoiaDragon]

Thanks!  I actually got the new drive showing up in the Storage Manager after installing the latest firmware(though, I don't think it was showing up in the raid bios, I'll have to reboot again to check), but still no rebuild disk option for some reason.  I have swap sata ports before, but I'll try it again now that the new drive is showing up.  My old drive is a Seagate 1TB & the new one is a WD 3TB, & my recovery drive is a WD 2TB.  I "figured" that having a similar drive wouldn't matter, but maybe I proved myself wrong?

As for Intel Matrix Storage Array Manager, I can't even find it.  Maybe that's something I can download, or should that be in here by default?  Or maybe you're talking about the Intel Rapid Storage Technology center?  I can't right click on anything in there, only left clicking allowed

I'm looking at both Clonezilla & Redo, sounds like Redo would be the easiest way to do this, but I'm late for work, so I gotta do more research later....can't wait to spend another night working on this!   I have 2 My Passport drives, both of which are big enough to make an image, so that might be what I have to restore from.  I'm not even sure how to build a new array, or what an array exactly is, so I'll have to do some more research on that as well.

Tons of this is new territory for me(though I still consider myself a complete & utter noob & have to rely on others with waaaaaay more experience then me!).  Thanks again for your advice!

[BigusSchmuck]

I guess my question would be is the RAID controller onboard or is it a separate card? Do you know what RAID setup you are using? Mirrored or RAID 5? Usually when rebuilding an array you'll want to try to stick to the same size and speed. Also, Windows managing RAIDS suck, I usually use what came with the card or motherboard.

[NightWolve]

Well, good luck!

I bought GetDatatBackForNTFS when I had early sectors of a backup drive overwritten and I made the mistake of cutting/pasting as a move when this situation happened (so I lost files at the source, too!), so with many MFTs overwritten, the partition data wiped, I needed software that could scan and recover orphaned/lost files, etc.

GDBforNTFS saved most of my legacy work (like Ys projects) thankfully! Still, it was depressing, never really recovered in a way and it was caused by a JavaScript exploit virus (just visiting the website in IE caused a download, execution and reboot to install in a very rapid fashion)...

[ParanoiaDragon]

I guess my question would be is the RAID controller onboard or is it a separate card? Do you know what RAID setup you are using? Mirrored or RAID 5? Usually when rebuilding an array you'll want to try to stick to the same size and speed. Also, Windows managing RAIDS suck, I usually use what came with the card or motherboard.

It must be onboard, all I have as far as cards go is a sound card & a wireless interwebz card.  I can't for the life of me figure out what Raid setup I have.  I've been googling & haven't seemed to find an answer that works.  I would think it'd be in the bios(CTRL+I), maybe I'm blind & it's right in front of my face.

As far as sticking to same size & speed, yeah, I've seen a lot of recommendations in regards to that since I've been a googlin'.  Though, not sure how that works seeing as how naturally over time, I get bigger & bigger hard drives.  Maybe partitioning a new hard drive to keep a partition around the same size??

As far as speed goes, I see that my Seagate that failed is 7200 rpm, while my new WD is 5400 rpm, so I went up in size, down in speed!   Maybe this is what I get for trying to keep the price down with other expenses that keep piling up.  I think I may have rushed too quickly to get a new drive.  The thought of it being relatively quiet sounded nice, & I don't do any gaming on my PC, that's what consoles are for!

This is what I ended up getting, wondering if I should've gotten the blue or black...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004RORMF6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00

[NightWolve]

Yeah, guess I got stuck with a 5400 RPM drive too. It was on sale at the time, and I wanted a strictly backup drive, so an external USB 3.0 drive at 3 TB for $120 was appealing. I didn't think about the RPM at the time, and sure enough WD went out of its way to tell you NOTHING on the packaging, inside or out, as to if it's 5400 v. 7200...

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/983303-REG/western_digital_wdbwlg0030hbk_nesn_3tb_elements_desktop_external.html

[BigusSchmuck]

I guess my question would be is the RAID controller onboard or is it a separate card? Do you know what RAID setup you are using? Mirrored or RAID 5? Usually when rebuilding an array you'll want to try to stick to the same size and speed. Also, Windows managing RAIDS suck, I usually use what came with the card or motherboard.

It must be onboard, all I have as far as cards go is a sound card & a wireless interwebz card.  I can't for the life of me figure out what Raid setup I have.  I've been googling & haven't seemed to find an answer that works.  I would think it'd be in the bios(CTRL+I), maybe I'm blind & it's right in front of my face.

As far as sticking to same size & speed, yeah, I've seen a lot of recommendations in regards to that since I've been a googlin'.  Though, not sure how that works seeing as how naturally over time, I get bigger & bigger hard drives.  Maybe partitioning a new hard drive to keep a partition around the same size??

As far as speed goes, I see that my Seagate that failed is 7200 rpm, while my new WD is 5400 rpm, so I went up in size, down in speed!   Maybe this is what I get for trying to keep the price down with other expenses that keep piling up.  I think I may have rushed too quickly to get a new drive.  The thought of it being relatively quiet sounded nice, & I don't do any gaming on my PC, that's what consoles are for!

This is what I ended up getting, wondering if I should've gotten the blue or black...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004RORMF6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00

I would have gotten Black myself as the green ones have that stupid power saving features. I have seen soooo many Western Digital green drives fail and it ain't funny (3 year vs 5 year warranty). In all honestly, you aren't going to really a noise difference between the two unless you go like 10,000 or 15,000 rpm drives.

[NightWolve]

The only time I ever witnessed a 10,000 RPM drive was at one of my jobs. It was awesome in how it sounded like grinding popcorn when it'd kick into high gear. But honestly, I don't see 10,000 RPM or more drives at computer stores much. I know I tried looking for them before, but it seems when it comes to retail you mostly find the usual choice between 7200 and 5400 RPM.

On drive failure, I definitely learned not to trust Maxtor, had one or two fail on me. I thought WD was the best of the best, that's what I have everywhere. I personally can't say I've had bad luck with them. On my 2nd computer, as it was dying, it started getting noisy and exhibited difficulty starting up. At the very least, once I got it started, it worked enough to give me time to copy everything over booted, after I bought another drive. The failure with the Maxtor drive was a bunch of bad sectors, so you weren't getting shit off that one!

[ParanoiaDragon]

Hmm, wondering if I should drop even more cash on the black(as I don't think I can return the green now), & then use the green for something else...

Well, one of the drives says Raid 1, but only 1, the others don't, for whatever that means...   Kinda wondering if I can uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology from the recovery drive that I'm working off of right now, & then re-install it to see if it fixes the glitch of not having the option to rebuild the image to a new disc, is that even a possibility?

[BigusSchmuck]

So its mirrored. It should just rebuilt the array itself as long as one of the drives is still good. In the future, if you do decide to continue with RAID, go with RAID 5 as it takes the best of RAID 0 and 1, but you will need at least 3 drives to do it.

[Opethian]

So its mirrored. It should just rebuilt the array itself as long as one of the drives is still good. In the future, if you do decide to continue with RAID, go with RAID 5 as it takes the best of RAID 0 and 1, but you will need at least 3 drives to do it.

RAID 5 isn't the best of raid 0 and 1 lol where did you come up with that conclusion? its distributed parity. RAID 0 has no parity and RAID 1 is a mirror.

[BigusSchmuck]

So its mirrored. It should just rebuilt the array itself as long as one of the drives is still good. In the future, if you do decide to continue with RAID, go with RAID 5 as it takes the best of RAID 0 and 1, but you will need at least 3 drives to do it.

RAID 5 isn't the best of raid 0 and 1 lol where did you come up with that conclusion? its distributed parity. RAID 0 has no parity and RAID 1 is a mirror.

It is when it comes to standard consumer grade pcs. I wouldn't use RAID 5 at work, but if your board or controller supports RAID 10 or even RAID 50 go for it.

[Opethian]

In a home PC you are either using SSD or 7200RPM SATA disks

RAID 5 is terrible for both types of disks will all the I/o wasted on each disk to calculate parity. SSD is a waste of write cycles to calculate parity (write cycles are basically the life of the drive)

I would agree with RAID 10 if you had the drive bays to accommodate it. RAID 5 and 50 only make sense with SAS (10k/15k) drives

[ParanoiaDragon]

Was out of town for several days, but now I'm home.  While away, I finally got a some advice on the Intel boards, here's what one guy said:

"Your new HDD is in 512e format: 4096b physical sector size, 512b logical emulated. While RAID HDDs was in 512 format: 512b physical sector size. 512 logical. You cannot mix in RAID arrays disks with different formats. Read the detailed specs of HDDs in store, you need a 512 format one, not 512e or 4K native."

Any thoughts?  Not sure if I should just ditch IRST from now on or what.  I'm going to be doing a couple more external backup's now, which'll take me a couple days.  I'm fairly paranoid about the opportunity to wipe my hard drives clean.  Is there any real danger on running the computer on a mirror?  Obviously it's not backing everything up continuously like I had it, but, other than that??  The more I read, the more of a noob I feel!