BOOTMGR is missing (RAID 0 ICH10R ASUS P6T Windows 7 Install)

[barryn]

I'm somewhat resurrecting the following thread. This thread is the closest thing on the net I have found to my situation.

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/75991-windows-7-install-cannot-load-raid-drivers.html

BOOTMGR is missing
Win 7 Install Disk boots but can't install ICH10R drivers to do repair
Have tried the registry change
Post shows all drives are fine and ICH10 post shows healthy raid 0 setup
Reseating the cables never helped. It did reset my BIOS which I have recorrected the settings again
It was dusty before this occurrence and I have blown it out now
My last backup was in March I've never actually tried a restore (Acronis TI) to see if it would even work on RAID 0
Seems to me I have to get my RAID 0 back to do any commands however I not familiar with the win 7 100mg partition so maybe that's the problem

I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this or how to correct it without blowing away my data... hopefully haven't yet. I'm not familiar with bootmbr and bootrec although I have tried some of those suggestions.

I'm thinking of trying to get win 7 installed a a different drive, then installing the RAID drivers on that drive, and then hoping I can see the original RAID 0 install and be able to repair.

I'm looking for ideas and help. Thx

 

[gregrocker]

Confirm that Win7 or it's 100mb System Reserved partition is marked Active: Mark Partition Active

Then run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times.

If this fails other steps are here for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start

We see nothing but problems here with RAID. In four years since beta never one single post about success or satisfaction with RAID, only one problem after another. It is also dated nearly useless technology, especially since it isn't even redundant and you lose both drives and all data if you lose one.

 

[Strontium]

Win 7 Install Disk boots but can't install ICH10R drivers to do repair

W7 has it's own native RAID driver for ICH10R so there should be no need to load 3rd party.

I see you've gone for the 100MB reserved partition, I always avoid that by defining partitions beforehand but that IIRC is where bootmgr is living or should be. Are you able to get to a command prompt in repair mode? If so use diskpart to check which is the active partition.

BTW I've been running RAID0 with great success and am very satisfied with it.

 

[gregrocker]

So glad to finally meet you! Please stick around.

May I ask why you choose RAID and what benefits it provides you?

 

[Strontium]

Thank you gregrocker, nice to meet you too.

Well, a bit OT but for me it's the efficiency and how much snappier everything is. It would IMO be nice if MS improved on prefetch though.

There is the argument that RAID0 is x times as likely to fail but the way I see it is all drives fail at some time or another, if we're lucky we will have moved on to something else before that happens. Best drive I ever had was a 120MB conner, lasted 15 years, well past it's usefulness.

On the other side of the stick I had 4 same brand drives fail in a period of 6 months at one time, the worst only lasting a month. They were standalone if it matters and controller failures, I think possibly they didn't like getting hot as ambient temps were quite high.

So for me RAID0 does not mean x times as likely to fail, as it will eventually fail just as a single drive will eventually fail. It does mean it's only as strong as the weakest drive and there is more data to lose than having separate drives. But as always, backup is the key if any data is irreplaceable. I hope people don't think that just because they have one drive there is no need for a backup of irreplaceable data because they believe it is less likely to fail

Anyway, hopefully the OP didn't reboot out of RAID and have Windows try and repair one of the split RAID drives.

 

[barryn]

I'm not sure how helpful this post will be but I thought I would try to provide an update. I could not find a way to detect the RAID from the windows launch in order to try a repair so ...

1.) I put in a fresh old EIDE drive I had that I was going to sell but hadn't and install win 7 on it.
2.) After getting the drivers installed on it I was able to see my data but I couldn't figure out how to repair the RAID win 7 install from there. I could not find bootrec for example to try a rebuild. I didn't try to download any tools to try to repair the RAID although I thought about. I didn't try EasyBCD althought I thought about. My main goal was to get my data copied right away while I had access to it, or at least as much as I could.
3.) Getting the data was a pain in the butt due to windows ownership issues. It took quite a while to work through that in some folder structures. I did later find that it seems some mp3 tags were messed up.
4.) The new windows install detected corruption and ran a chkdsk. I think that happened during one of the reboots before I was able to see the data. It did one on its own I think and I later requested both RAID partitions that I had created be chkdsked.
5.) Once I had the data I still had hope of trying to fix the boot issue without having to reinstall but couldn't figure it out. Also lingering in my mind was all of the data corruption issues.. So I decided not to waste anymore time on that.
6.) I reinstalled windows on the RAID (found out I had to unplug other drives or the install wouldn't boot so did this twice).
7. At that point it was just a matter of copying the data back over, setting up permissions, installing programs, etc. as needed but in the end it's better than what I had before just not fully capable.

I too believe RAID 0 is snappy. I'm trialing some new software called EaseUS Todo that says it supports RAID 0 and will probably buy it. My old Acronis TI 10 was not a good choice for Win 7 I found out.

Anyway, thats all I can remember at the moment. If anyone has any additional comments they want to provide regarding things that I could have done it might be helpful for me or someone else that comes across this in the future. Thanks much

 

[gregrocker]

The steps to attempt to repair Win7 were provided in Post #2, and are run from the boot disk and not from a newly installed OS. Did you run the exact steps in Post #2 to completion?

Acronis is a very good choice, in fact the premium choice for WIn7 amongst many of us who have been with it since before beta. To say that it isn't a good choice is as credible as recommending RAID0 which isn't even Redundant - that's right, it doesn't even live up to the first letter in its acroynm! - and as stated has been the source of regular complaints here for how it's dated technology doesn't get along with Win7 and fails with data loss on both HD's.

Thank you both for providing additional examples of relentless RAID problems.