SATA hard drive "shrunk" after messin with RAID !! 1

[transtec]

Hi all,
About two weeks back I was reaally in a soup trying to get my BIOS right to detect my DVD Writer to boot from a DVD, as mentioned in this post (

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1169297&page=1

). In the end I found out that it was no error in my BIOS but rather due to improper cabling between my IDE drives and IDE port that caused the DVD Writer to be not recognized. Well that was OK and later sorted out, but due to my messing around within the BIOS I think I now have a "shrunk" SATA hard drive.

I have : 1 SATA hard drive ( 160 Gigs )
1 ATA hard drive ( Maxtor 120 Gig )
1 ATA DVD Writer ( 16X Asus )

I remember trying to enable and then disable RAID on my motherboard. There were 4 options for RAIDing ( Stripe, JBOD etc. ) and I think I tried with several of them , all in the hope of getting my MoBo to detect my DVD Writer to boot. The original RAID setting was JBOD as I remember, and back then i had only enabled RAID for my SATA drive only and I cud see 153 Gigabytes of data for the SATA hard drive, which I think is the right capacity. But after trying out different RAID types like STRIPE, SPAN etc whilst enabling the RAID for the IDE drive as well, I see that my SATA hard drive has shrunk in size to somewehere around 128 Gigabytes as shown in Disk Manager.

In the hope of resurrecting this I have disabled RAID on both SATA and IDE and yet I still see no difference in my SATA hard drive's capacity.


My question is, do I need to format the entire SATA hard drive to get back into full capacity or can this be rectified in another method ?

P.S. In BIOS - Standard CMOS Settings I see that my SATA drive currently shows only 133 GBs in capacity ! And to my knowledge the IDE drive seems to be reporting the correct capcity in Disk Management which is 114.48 GB and 122 GBs in BIOS.


regards,
transtec ( desparately in need of help ! )

 

[jurgen36]

I can not understand what you were trying to do. How can you enable Raid with only one sata and ond ide drive? Raid systems need at the minimum two identical drives either sata or ide. So I really dont understand, if you could clarify the situation we might be able to help you.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[transtec]

Well by enabling I meant setting the IDE/SATA RAID function to Enabled in BIOS. And it is also possible to go down to the level of which channels on IDE or SATA you want to have RAID enabled in. I forgot to mention that my Mobo is an nForce4 based one by Gigabyte - GA-k8nF-9.
( But keep in mind that i have DISABLED RAID in the above settings in BIOS, and I do not know why the prob is still persisiting ).

Well Jurgen, if you are new to RAIDing, actually you dont need to have two identical hard drives to do it. As i said in my post above, I tried out with differnt versions of RAID like STRIPE, SPAN and JBOD ( which was the one that was originally there and was working fine ). I think only one RAID setting needs two identical drives to work. My mobo doesnt mention the RAID setting as in RAID 0, RAID 1 etc. but rather as JBOD, SPAN, STRIPE etc. so i do not know which setting would require two identical hard drives.

I hope this cleared the prob Im having with my hard drives. I would very much appreciate some help from this forum.

thanx and regards
Transtec.

 

[jurgen36]

Friend I designed raid systems for the last 14 years, believe me you can not have any raid with a single drive. Raid 0 which is of course stripe needs 2 or 4 or 6 drives and so on. Raid one again needs two drives minimum to operate. Raid 0+1 needs a minimum of 4 drives, raid 3, 5, 10 all need an absolute minimum of 3 drives usually more. But you can get away with 3. Jbod again needs multiple drives but they are just added together and it is not a raid system at all. Raid stands for redundent array of independent drives. I repeat any Raid system need an absolute minum of two drives. Thats all it is. By playing with the bios you probably overwrote part of the boot sector or sectors, this would give the effect you mentioned. Also changing the raid settings in the bios would have no effect whatever to the operations of the cd/dvd drives. Regards

Jurgen

 

[jurgen36]

Sorry I like to add something, there is actually a bord were you can mix sata and ide drives for a raid array, its the Asus P4P800 E Deluxe bord, it has two sata channels with a promise raid controller, another two sata channels with an Intel raid controller, and another ide raid connector which also uses the promise controller. Thats apart from the normal Ide connectors. Well on that bord you can, which I actually do, connect the two promise ide and sata connectors into a raid 0+1 with two sata and two ide drives, that gives me the speed of raid 0 plus the redundency of raid 1. The intel controller is used for a raid 1 backup system, the normal ide controller is used for two separate drives for linux and sun solaris, the slave is used for dvd burners. Altogether 10 drives.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[transtec]

Thanx Jurgen for the clarification,

Im sure u wud hav missed it in my post that my motherborad an nForce4 based one from Gigabyte [ GA-k8nf-9 ], does support RAID using both SATA and IDE. That said I have 2 hard drives , one a 160 Gig SATA and another IDE which is a 120 Gig Maxtor Diamond Plus 9.

I do not want RAID in any way as I want the data in my (old) 120 Gig IDE hard drive to be intact ( I am upgrading this AMD based PC from an old one ). Therefore when I initially built the system I enabled RAID ONLY for the SATA hard drive with JBOD setting. ( But when I was fiddling with the BIOS sometime later, I tried enabling RAID for my IDE hard drive as well )

I do not know how I got JBOD RAID working for one SATA hard drive alone. When I was building this system, RAID was something new to me and in my eagerness to get the system up and running I tried to configure the SATA drive to have any RAID setting that would work ( I mean so as to install Windows on it ). JBOD was the one ! But now since I know I cud disable RAID entirely in BIOS, I have done so.

As you said, since it is a problem with the boot sector ( i already suspected this cos the BIOS showed a reduced capacity when asked to detect the hard drive in Standard CMOS settings ), does it mean I wud have to do a low level format for the SATA drive to get it back in full capacity ?

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi all, I am not too familiar with RAID systems, but the indicated sizes leads me to think that the ADRESSING to the drives is wrong...

32bit adressing only goes to 128gb, ergo any drive above will show as 128gb (again most manufacturers will display drive sizes as 1000mb = 1gb, and true size would be 1024mb = 1gb)

48bit adressing goes beyond that limitation...

I would suggest looking into that avenue within the BIOS, ergo enabling the 48bit adressing...

Hope that helped...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[transtec]

Hey Ben,
nope this aint a problem of that sort. I know what you are talking of cos I had the same problem with my old Pentium III mobo, where I had to check whether my Mobo supported a bigger hard drive.
I am saying so becuse initiallyy when the system was built by me it showed 153 GBs and I think this should be the correct capcity for a 160 GB drive. It was only after the messing around with RAID did my hard drive report 128 GBs of data ( the last partition on the drive has lost 25 GBs of data )

 

[Freestone]

Hitachi tools can be found here:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

...
Restores drive fitness
Note: these utilities will overwrite customer data and allow repair of bad sectors.
Erase Bootsector utility (use DFT Utility option: Erase Boot Sector)
Low-level format utility (use DFT Utility option: Erase Disk
...

 

[transtec]

Hey FreeStone,
Thanx for the link, I think you have the sixth sense dude, cos I dont rememebr mentioning that my SATA hard drive is a Hitachi make . Anyways will try it out and let you know.

thanx again pal !

 

[kmcferrin]

Here's the deal: at some point you set up a mirrored set. When you set up a mirror using two disks of different sizes, the mirrored volume takes the size of the smallest available disk. Any unused space on the larger disk is lost.

The first thing that you should do is make a backaup of all of your data. Then, break the mirror set (if you haven't already). Then completely disable RAID. Then completely wipe the disk that is reporting the wrong size. Now when you FDISK it you should see the entire disk.

And jurgen36, you do not need identical drives to do RAID. You just need multiple drives. There are several boards that can do RAID across different interfaces. For example, I have a K8N that does RAID 0+1, but only has two SATA connectors. In this case you can stripe across SATA and mirror the SATA to IDE.

 

[transtec]

hey kmcferrin,
I thhink u are right. I remember setting the RAID level to mirroring or something. But that was only one RAID setting that I tried using. Right now I have disabled RAID all throughout my mobo and still I have the prob. hmmm ( sigh ... ! ) I think Ill have to go ahead with the low level format for my hard drive to recover the lost space :-(

Hey I got one more question for you pals. When I was trying out all these RAID settings in the RAID setup of the motherboard, each time I set a new RAID setting it asked if I wanted to clear the data in the disk. Does this mean if I chose YES for that I'd have lost all my data on the disks in the new RAID array I set up or is it some sorta other data which RAID uses to manage the hard drives ? I actually didnt know what all that question meant so I answered a NO to it.

thanx again guys,
Ill have to try with the formatting option then... ( sigh ... ! ) :-(

 

[kmcferrin]

It probably meant that you wiped the disk. When you set up a RAID set, the new "drive" that is created from the set is blank. If there was data on any of the disks before adding them to a RAID set then it would be lost.

 

[jurgen36]

:kmcferrin
As I pointed out in my second submission I do the same I am using the build in Promise controller for 2 x sata and 2 x ide drives in a raid 1+0 configuration, not 0+1 but the difference is only a reliability issue. If all the drives are not identical you will loose the extra capacity. Example 120 Gb and 160 Gb will only give you 240 Gb in raid 0 or 120 Gb in raid 1.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[transtec]

hmmm..... tried formatting the SATA disk with the Hitachi tools , but sadly this has not resolved the error. I still get 137.44 GB reported in BIOS when I earlier had a 163 Gigabits reported in the BIOS.

I first "erased the disk" and then also tried "erase boot sector". It aint working dudes. :-(

 

[kmcferrin]

Have you tried disabling the RAID controller and hooking it up to a different controller?

 

[transtec]

Yes I have pugged the cable into all other 3 free SATA ports on my mobo. It still doesnt get detected. Plus I hav swapped the sides of the SATA cable that was provided with the MoBo, to connect to the Hard Drive and the MoBo. No result. Im thinking this is more to do with the BIOS or the MoBo. Therefore Im gonna take it to my retail store. Maybe they'll plug it to another PC and test it.

Funny thing is while goin thru all the tools and scan disks and all that stuff, I read that my hard drive's end cylinder is somewhere in 260,000 or so. Maybe the hard drive is recognizing this as the last cylinder and wont attempt to look beyond that.

I have hosted an image of the Hard Disk label @

http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/6676/picture0061wp.jpg

 

[BadFrog]

Have you tried "fdisk /mbr"?

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy"
Albert Einstein

 

[transtec]

Well GUYS,

Im so relievd and happy to say that I've resolved this problem. Well after all that messing with the mobo and bios settings I went and gave my hard drive to the shop i bought it from. After their inspection, they said that they cant "repair" it and gave me a raplecment with the same capcaity. It's a SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 drive with the one platter 160 GB disk. Well I aint excatly happy with the replacmemnt cos when i cam home and chkd on the net the Hitachi has an 8.5 msec seek time compared to Seagate's 11 msec seek time. Except for that the drives are almost similar in performnce with the Seagate givin less heat ( it dint burn my finger when i touched it like the Hitachi used to ).

Well as far as this thread has gone, i wanna thatnk all of u for heklping me out. Im still wondering what could hav gone wrong. This is the first time I hav heard a hard drive actually "shrink" in capacity yet report no errors. Well it did report an error once i remember, saying that the G: drive ( which is the partition that shrunk ) had some unlinked record or something like that. And Windows fixed that up right there in Scandisk. It was after this incident that the hard drive started to show a reduced capacity.

As kmcferrin said I shud hav plugged the hard to another mobo and seen what was the result. Now as I think about it, I pity my mobo for goin thru all those frustrated restarts and hasty and unstable BIOS changes.

catch u later folks,

thanx again.