I have a Windows 7 system with an MSI motherboard (running the latest AMD BIOS) and two of my four disks (not the system boot disk) configured via the Mobo as RAID-1. After a normal system restart today, the RAID BIOS reports that one of the two drives has been disconnected or has failed. It's not really failed; via recovery tools I can verify that if I take the BIOS out of RAID mode. But I can find no way to re-add the second hard disk to the array and rebuild via the BIOS - the only option seems be to delete the array and recreate it, but I've done that once before and it blows away the disk.
It's done this once before, however on a subsequent reboot after double-checking the drive cabling (but not changing anything) and it boot up fine. So I think the mobo RAID is a little bit flaky.
At this point I would like to remove the RAID drivers, change to AHCI mode and switch over to using a Windows 7 dynamic mirror disk. But the RAID drivers seem somehow deeply bound into the Windows startup - I can't find anything like the good ol' safe-mode in Windows 7.
If I boot from the Win 7 install disk in ACHI mode I can use recovery tools to log in to the Windows 7 installation, so the boot drive it seems fine with ACHI mode. Additionally, I can see all my other disks, run chkdsk on them and they seem to be fine.
If I try to boot from the HDD in AHCI mode, it just reboots part way through, presumably because the RAID drivers load and conflict with the BIOS being set to AHCI.
So:
How do I strip the RAID drivers from my Win 7 installation?
If I delete the RAID logical disk, will it really delete partitioning information, or is that just a poorly worded message when it says the data on the disk will be deleted?
If I disconnect the 2 disks in a RAID array, then delete the logical disk array, and then reconnect and reboot still in RAID mode, will the disks simply revert to RAID single-disks like my other 2 and then maybe I can leave windows with RAID drivers by operate the disks as singles with 2 of them in a Windows dynamic disk mirrored setup?
Does Windows 7 have anything like the Windows XP Repair Install, where it will reinstall the O/S binaries from CD, but leave apps and setup alone. I am really hoping I don't have to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 - the last one, when I upgraded from XP, took me two days to get everything set up and installed.
