Partitions disappearing are boggling my mind

[quolo]

I'm absolutely stumped on this one. I'll try to explain it as clearly as possible, but it gets a bit confusing.

I have a homemade machine, based on an Asus K8V SE Deluxe mobo. This model motherboard has 4 SATA connectors, with 2 on board SATA RAID controllers - one VIA chip and one Promise chip.

I have been running stable for over a year with 2 Hitachi 250Gb HDs using the VIA RAID chip in a RAID 1 configuration. However, one of the drives is beginning to fail, so I'm going to RMA it.

I'm pretty cautious about losing data, so I plunked down some dough to pick up a couple Western Digital 250Gb HDs to run RAID 1 on the Promise controller. I installed them just fine, formatted and backed up my data, and was all ready to pull the failing Hitachi out knowing I had my data copied on both WD drives. So I patted myself on the back for being prepared and forethought.

So I de-RAIDed the two Hitachi drives using the VIA utility, and tried to boot to the good drive, and then wiped, repartitioned, reformatted, and reinstalled Windows XP Pro, since it needed a rebuilding anyway. When I came back up, I could see the newly rebuilt Hitachi drive (C) and the dying Hitachi drive (D), but I was expecting to also see the Western Digital drives (E). My supposedly functioning WD drives running RAID 1 on the Promise controller weren't assigned a drive letter, though I was receiving a functional report when the Promise BIOS loaded during startup. In fact, if I go into Disk Management, I can see the Western Digital RAID 1, but it shows as unpartitioned space.

It gets weirder. I made a mistake in trying to see what partitions I could see booting from the Windows XP CD - I accidentally did a repair Windows install on (C), which of course screwed Windows up, so I had to repartition, reformat, and reinstall Windows again on that drive. That seemed to go fine. Then I started moving drives around a bit to see if I could see one of the Western Digital drives if I hooked it up to the VIA connection, but no luck. When I moved the drives back, I now was only able to boot up to the failing drive (What was D). If I boot to the drive I just rebuilt anew, I get a blinking cursor towards the upper left of the screen and no activity. Booting up to the failing drive, I now have only one drive letter, and Disk Management shows me two unallocated disks underneath my properly functioning but failing disks (one for the newly rebuilt drive and one for the Promise array).

That's two partitions that seem to have disappeared, even though the drives seem to show up in Disk Management. What might be causing this problem and how do I get it back?

Also of note - a couple weeks before installing the 3rd and 4th HDs, I upgraded my PSU to a 500w unit. My case temperature reads within reason and the drives are not too warm to the touch. The repeatability of the problem, even from a cold startup, leads me to think the problem isn't thermal.

 

[wolluf]

I accidentally did a repair Windows install on (C), which of course screwed Windows up

Why? a repair reinstall should have left windows very much as it was before the repair if it was a new install in the first place? So what else did you do?

I would definitely remove the original failing drive from the machine - bad hardware can cause all sorts of problems, apart from complicating the issue. I'd also disconnect the 2 WD drives until you get your operating system back up and running.

Your 'C:' drive may have lost its active partition (you could boot from 98 boot floppy and use fdisk to set partition active). You could just reinstall XP on it again - or run a repair reinstall! (was it really this:-

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341

that you did before). Or run chkdsk /p, fixmbr & fixboot from recovery console.

Once you have windows up again, try connecting the WD drives separately (and not both at once), rather than as a RAID array.

 

[quolo]

The repair installation created a problem with the video driver - it was reporting that my ATI drivers were not installed, though they were prior and were showing up in Add/Remove Programs. No matter what I tried - reinstalling the video drivers from CD, unstalling from the device in device manager, removing the device entirely, I wasn't able to uninstall or reinstall any video driver or really affect any change. I figured it was probably a registry issue, but since it was a brand new build and I had no data to lose, I figured I'd just rebuild it from scratch rather than troubleshoot the issue further.

I do plan to remove the failing drive as soon as I can, but it's currently the only functioning drive with most of my data on it and the only one with a recognizeable partition. As soon as I get something solid up, I'll copy over my data and take the failing drive out, to be certain. I'll take off the 2 WD drives for now as well, as you suggested.

There's an interesting article here: I'm thinking I'll give DiskPatch and/or MBRTool to see if I can't succeed in repairing the partition. Since I've got nothing but a little time to lose on C, I'm thinking I'll use it as a guinea pig for these utilities.

Still, even if the recovery works out, that leaves me stumped as to why partitions have repeatedly disappeared on me. What can cause a drive to lose its active partition?

And thanks for the advice.

 

[wolluf]

Are you saying you can't just reinstall XP on the good Hitachi drive connected on its own in the machine? (ie, clean install, creating new partition with XP install's partitioning tools removing existing first if it can see it).

Does the XP install process actually see the existing partition (which won't boot) on there? (it should do - if not, you may have a more serious problem).

The losing active partition idea was an educated guess - I've seen it before after something's gone wronmg with an install process (like it obviously has with your repair - the only problem I've seen regarding drivers on repair is when the existing installation is using viaagp1.sys. The repair prompts for this during the install - you can supply it on floppy or CD or locate it on the hard drive. If you don't supply it, graphics driver not loaded - and like yours its very difficult to load it later from within windows - though not impossible).

Its only becaue you said you'd had stable running for a year that I didn't suggest a likely hardware issue - as 'disappearing partitions' can also be caused by other (ie, not hard drives) bad hardware - notably RAM (but other items too).

 

[quolo]

From the Windows XP CD on bootup, from the Disk Management utility in the Windows XP control panel, and from the PowerQuest partinfo utility I downloaded, the partition on the good Hitachi HD is not found in any way. It's as if the drive were as it was shipped to me in a box and I just plugged it in, though it was otherwise just a week ago. Between now and then, all I have done is change the SATA cables between drives, making it the secondary and back to the primary. Somewhere in that fiddling, my partition went bye bye.

I'm almost certain I could create a new partition and start over, but I'm concerned it might disappear again, since I also seem to have lost the partition on the WD array.

In retrospect, I think you might be right on about the viaagp1.sys issue. It was a little while ago, but I do think I might have been prompted for a missing file and totally forgot about it. That would make sense to me.

I'm still reading up on the DiskPatch manual, but I'll be sure to let you know if it works at all. And I'll be keeping an eye on my mobo and RAM and such in case anything starts to look a little iffy.