G
George Macdonald
Just thought this might be useful to someone else:
In the course of attempting to convert my single drive to RAID-1 (I had a
"spare" drive hanging around) I managed to clobber the partition info in
the MBR. This was using the nVidia BIOS RAID management (nForce3 mbrd) and
yes I felt dumb but it is confusing: "Select Drive?"... "Delete Array?"...
"Clear Data?"... "Delete Data?"... etc., etc.
So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from backup --
yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a try just to see what
it would make of the drive contents: sure enough, the Partition Management
utility showed an empty drive *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out
so I clicked on it and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition
layout in a few seconds.... *RELIEF*
Oh, and yes, I did get the RAID-1 working but what a PITA it was -- note
nVidia's docs give no clues about building a mirror from a single existing
drive -- and rebuild in WinXP was excruciatingly slow: ~12GB/hour on SATA
drives.
In the course of attempting to convert my single drive to RAID-1 (I had a
"spare" drive hanging around) I managed to clobber the partition info in
the MBR. This was using the nVidia BIOS RAID management (nForce3 mbrd) and
yes I felt dumb but it is confusing: "Select Drive?"... "Delete Array?"...
"Clear Data?"... "Delete Data?"... etc., etc.
So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from backup --
yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a try just to see what
it would make of the drive contents: sure enough, the Partition Management
utility showed an empty drive *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out
so I clicked on it and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition
layout in a few seconds.... *RELIEF*
Oh, and yes, I did get the RAID-1 working but what a PITA it was -- note
nVidia's docs give no clues about building a mirror from a single existing
drive -- and rebuild in WinXP was excruciatingly slow: ~12GB/hour on SATA
drives.