I have 4 large hard drives (totaling over 1 TB) on a pci raid controller (that's working fine), and I used windows dynamic disk spanning to make them into one virtual drive. I have over 700GB of data on these drives, and recently windows stopped functioning on me for some reason.
I've reinstalled windows, and all my drivers, and disk management shows all four drives (and my separate boot drive), but labels them as "foreign". Right clicking them shows only "properties" "convert to basic disk (lose all data)" and "help". Unsurprisingly "help" was of no help, so I came here to ask...
I would go with turiya on this one. but, you might be able to check things out in administrative tools and then going to computer management, and then going into disk management and playing around with it.
wait... so you had a hardware raid controller but you used the Windows dynamic raid?
They work a bit different, if you set up your raid array in your raid controller bios your data would still be there. The hardware would have presented Windows with an extremely large disk, rather than four independent disks that you built your raid out of. Course you can do more with a raid controller.
I would recommend backing your data up, building yourself a hardware raid array and dumping the windows dynamic disk bull. Unless you are using JBOD then you don't have a choice.
I personally like RAID 1+0 it requires at least 4 disks but you can store lots of data and it is redundant. It is two separate Raid 1 arrays (two identical disks) that are then striped (you could call it spanned). So you could lose one disk from both raid one arrays and you are still golden as long as you replace the disk before the other goes bad.
Thanks for the input, however, my disks aren't evenly sized, not to mention the array is 70% full, so RAID is out of the question. I guess I forgot to mention in my post the words "span" and "jbod", you guys must have assumed I was using a RAID 0 setup.
Anyway, I did learn something out of this, with windows dynamic disks, partition data for the arrays is stored on each of the disks in said array, so as long as you have all the disks present, windows can automatically rebuild the array for you without problems, even with RAID, I'll bet (provided you haven't tried to write to the disks since the failure).
Now I'm just curious as to how this all will work with vista.
You did use the word "span", but when used with the term RAID, it's usually a synonym for Striping (RAID 0). Honestly, I've never dealt with a JBOD, it ususally doesn't come up in my line of work.
JBOD = poor mans raid. Justa Bunch Of Disks is what it stands for. I haven't used it in years cause if one disk goes bad you'll probably loose everything. Happened to me back during the Win2k days. It works great for home network file servers, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything but data you wouldn't mind loosing. I actually use a Buffalo Terastation (Raid 5) and I'm just about to swap it out for a Buffalo Terastation Pro (swappable HDDs) and probably run RAID3 (Three stripe drives one parity, is that right or is that raid 2?)
Anyway, JBOD is what you do when your disks aren't evenly sized and you don't want to lose capacity, especially if the disks aren't for any intense application, where both speed and redundancy don't really factor in.
And yes, what you described is RAID3, not RAID2. =P
edit: I know somebody is going to try to correct me and say "independent". Don't.
