Lost RAID5 after BIOS flash

[Sowser]

After upgrading the bios on my ASUS P6T Deluxe my RAID5 array consisting of 6 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green hard drives is no longer functional. As near as I can tell upgrading the bios reset the bios settings to default and when I rebooted it started in IDE mode and wrote a little bit of data to two of the drives. I use the 6 SATA slots for the RAID5 drives and one on the SAS slots (used as SATA) for the OS drive. If there any way to reconstruct the array after this occures or do I need to do a complete reformat? If that is the case how do I prevent this from occuring in the future when I want to upgrade my bios?

[Major_A]

Do you have the Intel Storage Matrix software installed? I can't remember but there may be an option to repair/rebuild the array in the software.

[Sowser]

Nope, I don't think so. I build the array through the marvell app that is included with the mother board.

[Major_A]

Marvell? I thought your board had a ICH10R southbridge? You can still boot your OS drive but not the RAID array correct? If so get the Matrix software and give it a try.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product ... uctID=2101

[Sowser]

The Intel software didn't help. I think because two drives were modified when my computer restarted in IDE the array is kaput. Unless anyone had a bright idea I'm going to reformat and reconstruct it over the weekend. Ant thought on how to avoid this in the future when updating BIOS?

[Sowser]

Since no one has any ideas on how to avoid crashing a RAID 5 array after a bios update I think I'll just go ahead and format all 6 drives and forget using raid.

[Major_A]

I've flashed my BIOS twice with RAID configs (onboard ICH10R/RAID 0 boot drives) and didn't have this issue. Maybe it was a fluke or maybe you didn't go back and fix the RAID settings in the BIOS after the flash. Every time you flash a BIOS it resets the BIOS to "load optimal defaults" after the flash.

[Sowser]

Actually being new to RAID I KNOW I didn't go back and fix the RAID settings after the flash but with the set-up I have with the P6T Deluxe, using the SAS drive as a boot drive (which wasn't easy to figure out how to do) the BIOS setting are a bit complicated and I'd rather risk lossing a little info due to a drive failure rather than everything due to an array crash. Thanks anyway though.