RAID 1 split apart?

[lukeman]

What I have had for 2.5 years with my computer I built is a Windows 7 Ultimate setup with a 2X2 terabyte hard drive RAID 1 configuration. Just recently I noticed that I have 2 new drive letters in My Computer show up. Normally I would show just my C drive as a 2 terabyte capacity drive show up like it should but just recently I have noticed 2 other drive letters that were not there before(E&F). One of them looks like an almost exact copy of my C drive and the other is a much smaller drive that has a 99.9 MB capacity called "System Reserved" and appears to not have any files in it that I can see.

I guess I need to know if my RAID 1 setup got broken or if I just need to turn RAID 1 back on in the BIOS. I have actually tried this and got an error that my computer was missing BOOTMGR and could not start. I may just do this but use the Windows 7 installation disk to fix the missing file to get my system back the way it was but that could screw it up. I just want to get someones opinion first before doing so. The BIOS has my SATA settings as AHCI rather than RAID. I'm pretty sure it was set as RAID before but cannot be sure. Perhaps my computer detected BOOTMGR missing and defaulted to AHCI for it to boot I just don't know. Everything looks fine in the other menus that RAID is configured so I'm kind of puzzled.

Any input is appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Sound like your mirror has been broken. Been a while since I did RAID stuff with Windows but, before you go any further I would get your data backed up to an external USB drive first.

There are different types of RAID,

1. Hardware RAID - this is via an insertable PCI RAID card.
2. Fake RAID - integrated into motherboard, called fake as it's not a RAID controller but rather a hybrid firmware/software solution in BIOS.
3. Software RAID - as it suggests is an OS based RAID solution.

It's probably likely that you have Fake RAID as software RAID isn't the best idea on a Windows box in all honesty. I have used Fake RAID before and got into problems with it and gave up due to it unpredictable behaviour. Pretty sure you should have RAID set in BIOS and not AHCI.

IMHO, raid the piggy bank and buy a cheap hardware RAID controller to put into that box and get the benefits like peace of mind and possibly faster data access. A possible contender might be this PCI-E card.

Agian, before you try anything with a broken RAID config, backup, backup, backup...