Can't Repair 64-bit Boot Problem with RAID

[betona]

I flashed my BIOS yesterday in an attempt to address a fairly recent issue coming out of sleep (black screen of death) on Windows 7 Home 64-bit.

When I rebooted, I didn't realize that the flashing had turned off RAID, so Windows didn't see what it was looking for and went into a repair mode that obviously horked one of the drives when it should have seen RAID.

When I boot from the CDROM and go into Repair, it doesn't see any OS to repair. Then I try to add the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers and it does see them on the USB. But it grinds for a minute or so and then says the driver install failed. The is with the exact same Intel RAID drivers I've used many times last year with the betas and later the purchased version. I've also confirmed these drivers still load up fine if I start down the full install path (vs. repair). It can't read things and wants to do a format & install so I back out and quit.

The official repair steps of opening a DOS window and using 'bootrec /RebuildBcd' do not work for me. These are:

bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd

When I run the Bootrec commands above from a DOS prompt, the BCD steps say 'file not found' and the Bootrec command says it will take a few minutes, but is immediately done. And afterwards, the reboot fails so that doesn't work (obviously because it didn't load RAID).

The only good news is that I was able to create a rescue CD using BartPE (with the 32-bit RAID drivers) that has allowed me to copy everything off to my 1TB external USB drive. Once I boot to Windows PE on my rescue CD, I can see everything on my RAID drives just fine, so everything is still there.

It's a darned shame that I can't fix that boot record, but with RAID drivers not loading in repair mode, I'm stuck.

This is on a nice homebuilt system built last summer with an excellent Asus mobo, terabyte drives, quad-core Intel, 6G RAM, etc.--all current stuff.

Any advice most welcome! I suspect I'll be reformatting it later tonight.

 

[theog]

You can try this.

When you get to the Black screen of death, press the windows key once.

 

[betona]

Thank you theog, but I tried all sorts of combinations of the Windows key on those occasions when it failed to come out of sleep. I figured it's either a graphics driver or possibly BIOS and Asus released a new one last month.

Right now my severe problem is that I have an unbootable PC and no ability to fix the boot files on RAID.

 

[arkhi]

Do you have software RAID or hardware RAID?

 

[betona]

Uh, the motherboard supports RAID, and it also requires the Matrix Storage Manager drivers. So both?

In any case, I gave up and reinstalled and am putting things back -- too much to do and not enough time to keep fiddling with it in hopes of magically bringing back the boot record.

 

[arkhi]

^Nah, it's hardware. When your motherboard supports raid, usually the OS doesn't even realize you're on a RAID system (based on my experience; diskmgmt.msc, device manager, etc) and views it as a single drive.

Just for your info, I would think that you might have needed to rebuild the MBR since it can't find which boot drive is which.

Remember, after your BIOS loads the RAID materials, after that, software should think of your RAID system as just one hard drive.

 

[betona]

Oh yeah - I knew I needed to rebuild the MBR, but every attempt using every trick I could find failed.

I'm back up now, hand-restoring things from the image I grabbed of my hard drive before I reformatted...