Windows 10: W10 Upgrade Destroyed my RAID

I upgraded from W7 to W10 last week and all went smoothly...or so I thought.
I launched a program today and it failed because its exe file was missing. My audio DAW PC was built by a specialist firm here in the UK - Scan. It was configured as RAID with a drive D: and one called "Extra Storage E:"
Drive E: is now no longer showing. A bit of a disaster as all the music videos I've ever made and edited were on there. W10 did not throw up a warning about encountering a RAID configuration.
Is there any way at all of accessing what was on E: ?
*cry

:)

 

Windows 10 install disabled RAID

My RAID was on the boot disk, and was disabled during the install. When I complained about this I received a reply that essentially RAID was silly and I shouldn't use it anyway!

Is your RAID internal? Does W10 support the RAID controller? I get the feeling that RAID support was not a priority for Microsoft. There's also chatter about the install's changing the drive interface to a newer, supposedly faster flavor, which is not
RAID-compatible. I wound up removing my second drive after experimenting with booting from it, whereupon it uninstalled W10 without asking me. After that I was forced to do a clean install as I did not trust that an upgrade, rollback, upgrade again sequence
would produce a reliable result.

Is your RAID an external USB device? I have had problems with W10 dropping external USB drives. I helped ameliorate by changing some Windows settings about powering down USB devices, and by removing and reinstalling other USB software, such as my UPS and
scanner SW packages, rebooting, and making sure the drive was mounted before I began the reinstall. For the scanner software I had to do this twice - using the scanner seemed to affect the disk. Now the disk stays mounted most of the time

 

W10 corrupts W7 hard drive

W8.1 was working fine as a removable hard drive. W7 installed on a RAID array as multi partitions. Works fine and both OS can be booted and W8.1 reads the RAID array when booting as W8.1

W10 upgrade completed on removable 8.1 drive, but then checked RAID drives for errors and changed them.

W7 on raid no longer boots. After severel hours W7 finally re-installed on RAID array. (data is on other partition so ok.) Tested working all data recovered.

Here's the kicker.

As soon as I boot from W10 it says "reboot required to fix drives" then corrupts the Windows 7 install... Which doesn't need fixed!!

The drive containing W7 OS becomes unreadable although other data partitions on the RAID array are OK.

W7 recovery tries to fix the hard drive then fails.

W10 changed drive letters first attempt, so I thought this an easy fix, but in fact every fresh W7 install is corrupted as soon as I boot from W10.

This is a major problem. Why is W10 changing the drive parameters on a completely seperate fully operational operating system?

 

It may be helpful to post a screenshot of your Disk Management window.

 

Hi, thanks. I didn't know what that was (!), but here it is.
'N' and 'M' are both on an external backup drive plugged in via USB. There should be a drive E: with a capacity of about 1TB.

 

Right-click at drive D:
select Change drive letter
from list select E:
confirm twice

..then it should work

 

Before I had two available drives, a D: and an E: so won't this leave me without D: ?

 

Drive D must be a mirror of C using Raid 1. Have you looked into your motherboard bios to see if drive E is showing up and how it is configured?

 

D could still be the array. Assuming you set the array up in the BIOS, and didn't do a software RAID, the update shouldn't have broken the array.

 

C: drive is a separate solid state drive.
I always thought that D: and E: were one partitioned 2TB drive with RAID mirror in place to protect D: where all my main data is. As you can gather, I'm not all that technically savvy. I'll try and look out the detailed spec that accompanied the invoice to see what that says.

I set up the external HP backup drive N: to continuously backup C: and D: But of course I should have set it up to back up E: also...

 

To be clear here, a RAID1, aka mirror, needs two drives. So, if you had two 1 TB drives, Windows would see one 1 TB "drive".

 

So it looks like the separate E: drive has failed. I was hearing some odd regular clicking from inside the case earlier.
I'll see about taking it to a local PC shop to see if they can jump start and retrieve anything from it.
*Huh
Thanks for chiming in guys, I appreciate it.

 

What kind of "RAID configuration" are we talking about here?

Did you use your motherboard/chipset features to create a RAID array? Or did you use Windows drive mirroring features for that purpose?

 

When I bought the PC from Scan UK I accepted their suggestion have a RAID configuration, so I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that. Would the boot up screens tell me that?

 

A little bit confusing: RAID1 (mirror set) consists of two physical disks, but operating system sees it as only one disk. A proper device driver is responsible for writing the same data to both physical disks, so if one of them fails, all data are still accessible on second disk.

If you have one partition created on RAID array, then you will see it as one and only one drive (for example E. Under common circumstances, you cannot access physical disks in RAID1 array separately. This is necessary to avoid data inconsistency; both physical disks have to contain the same data.

So it is strange to have two drive letters D: and E: for the same partition on the mirror set. It can be done using a registry hack; however it should not be necessary. You can try to redirect pagefile to C: drive, restart, then change drive letter of your mirrored partition to E: and test your applications. Changing drive letter has no effect on data, the partition itself and its content remains intact.

Furthermore, usually there is some application (Marvell, Intel, SiliconImage etc) for monitoring health of RAID arrays; if you have one, you may easily discover if array is inconsistent or if it contains failed physical disk. Then you may rebuild the array or replace the failed physical disk and then rebuild RAID1 array without loss of data.