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I have an ASUS Sabretooth 990fx R2.0 motherboard, and I have three HDD's in total. 2 x 250GB Samsung EVO SSD drives and a single WD 1TB HDD.

I had set up my 2 SSD drives in RAID-1 configuration using the on-board hardware RAID, with the separate 1TB drive non-raided and used purely as a data drive.

This configuration was all working well for around the last 3 months or more until I recently started to notice an error on POST saying that the RAID array was in a "critical" state. I booted into the RAID setup and saw that the "LD" definition that I'd previously set up to contain the two SSD drives now only contains 1 drive. The other drive (according to the RAID setup utility) was "failed or disconnected", however other screens within the RAID util show the "disconnected" drive to by perfectly healthy - this is also confirmed by Windows 8.1 itself when I boot all the way into Windows and check the health of the drive from the Disk Management utility.

I do not seem to be able to edit the existing "LD" RAID definition in order to "re-assign" the drive that has seemingly unassigned itself from the array and it would appear that my only option is to delete the LD definition and re-create it, however, I'm assured that this will completely erase the entire disk when I do this, which (given that this is my Windows partition) is something I want to completely avoid.

How can I re-assign the unassigned disk to the existing RAID definition without erasing/losing any data on the currently assigned RAID disk?

Here's a single picture of the LD definition screen within the RAID utility showing the problem:

enter image description here

I've uploaded a gallery of screenshots of the RAID util showing other screens from the utility highlighting the problem in more detail here: https://i.sstatic.net/Gr5xs.jpg

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  • If your RAID controller is Intel, can you check your Intel Rapid Storage Utility to see the status of the device in Windows? See this, it might help: asus.com/support/FAQ/1001549
    – Mahdi
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 22:19
  • @Mahdi - Unfortunately, according to the ASUS website page for the motherboard the RAID controller on-board is an AMD SB950 controller.
    – CraigTP
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 22:23
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    I updated the title to reflect that you are using firmware RAID rather than hardware RAID. It's actually implemented in software. It's a bit of a pedantic point, mind you. RAID-1 takes almost no processing power to implement.
    – ChrisInEdmonton
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 22:27
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    @CraigTP I presume they have a similar utility. My main question is that how do you know that the "disconnected" drive is good.
    – Mahdi
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 22:27
  • @Mahdi According to this image in my posted gallery the RAID utility (and also the BIOS's built-in "SMART" health monitoring) say the drive is healthy. Windows also does not report any errors on the drive.
    – CraigTP
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 22:43

1 Answer 1

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Well, I've managed to fix the problem. No idea exactly what caused it in the first place, but the solution is to use AMD's RAIDXpert software which will allow you to simply "rebuild" the RAID array (which was a single button click and took around 30-45 minutes for my array).

The process, you are warned, will delete all data from the drive that had become unassigned from the array, and rebuild it with data from the drive that is still part of the array. Once this process was completed, my RAID Array was configured and functioning perfectly once again.

The difficulty in this is acquiring the AMD RAIDXpert software, usually available direct from AMD's website, this software has a habit of continually being removed and re-added, only to be removed again from their website. As of this writing (16th Jan 2015), the software is currently unavailable from the AMD website, but emailing AMD support directly and asking nicely might get you a copy. Alternatively, you could take a look here.

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