# MBR of RAID volume overwritten, OS fails to boot. Help.



## btarunr (Jan 16, 2009)

I've screwed up, big time. 

My machine has a RAID 0 of two 500GB drives. The resulting volume stores my Windows XP installation. Its contents are vital. I installed an additional 80GB IDE HDD to  install Kubuntu. During Kubuntu's setup, those 500GB drives were displayed as is, and not as the resulting volume. I was able to make sure the right drive (hdc, that 80 GB HDD) was partitioned and formatted, but the grand screwup came where in the "finalise" step, you have to specify where the boot-loader has to be installed. This option was hidden in a seperate dialog that comes up on clicking an "advanced" button somewhere. Well...the installer wrote the boot loader to (hda), the first member of the RAID 0 volume, when the installer doesn't recognise the volume itself and only its member disks. 

Windows doesn't boot, neither does Kubuntu (shows Grub error 15). I need a way to recover data from the volume. I'm hoping the volume's contents are intact, though its MBR is gone. How do I boot Windows?

I can't use a WinXP boot floppy made from another system, since the boot floppy won't recognise a RAID volume. Should I boot the machine with the Windows XP install CD + AHCI driver floppy and install the OS _without_ formatting the volume, so at least I could safely move my files to another drive even if the resulting OS is unstable? Ideas please.


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## newtekie1 (Jan 16, 2009)

So the RAID 0 volume is still intact?  The RAID controller still sees it, and says it is healthy?

I would say, try and install Windows on another drive, then when you are in the new install of Windows, see if you can at least access the data to offload it somehwere.  Then reformat the RAID volume and re-install windows.


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## Deleted member 3 (Jan 16, 2009)

First of all, vital data on a RAID 0 volume? Silly. Apart from that, for software it matters not if it's RAID or not. If it's simply the MBR that got screwed start recovery console and use fixmbr/fixboot.


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## btarunr (Jan 16, 2009)

I've never had reliablilty issues with RAID 0, even with this,  until I messed with it. Trying both options. I've to prepare the AHCI floppy first.


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## btarunr (Jan 17, 2009)

Starting the system with install CD + AHCI floppy  and fixing MBR through the recovery console  solved the issue. Thanks!

While we're at it, 







^what do those "timeouts" in the RAID controller's eventlog mean? I've backed up by data, though do those indicate an impending failure?


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## newtekie1 (Jan 17, 2009)

If those are Seagate drives, it probably means you have some bad firmware.  A known issue with Seagate drives, the drive freezes for 30+ seconds in RAID arrays.  Some arrays indicate this as a failure, and kick the drive out of the array, sometime it is just registered in the log.

I went through this issue with my 1.5TB drives. I had to RMA one before I realized that it was bad firmware because all my drives were having the same problem.  I contacted Seagate about it, and they sent me the updated firmware to fix the issue.  Followed their instructions on loading it, and all has been fine since, didn't even have to rebuild the array.


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## btarunr (Jan 17, 2009)

Yes, they're 7200.10. I do notice some random freezes. Each time Windows boots, the progress-bar animation on the bootscreen (those 4~5 boxes sliding) freezes for ~5 secs after two full rounds.


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