Raid0 array restoration after RMA

[AnotherRandomUs]

Hi.

Hopping to find some help here, fingers crossed. My Duo16 went through a RMA after it suddenly shut down and refused to power up again. It had with 2 nvme's configured in raid 0. 

When I opened the support ticket I was told I needed to backup any data, as the laptop would be factory restored once repaired. I argued with the support agent pointing out the laptop did not power up and the disks were configured in a raid array making it difficult for me to save anything, but wasn't given any options despite asking for a specific few.

Long story short, I ended up imaging both 2Tb nvmes using macrium. Whole drive, sector by sector, no intelligent copying BS. About 2hrs per drive. 

A couple of weeks and I have it back. Drives are factory restored as I was told they would, but not forming a raid array. One has the OS partition, recovery image etc, the other is empty and labelled as 'data'. Did not give a second thought as I popped the nvme's out and into the enclosure to restore the images I had extracted. 4 hours later, pop them back in, power the thing up, it goes straight into bios, no bootable drives found.

I recall the drives were not factory restored in a raid fashion, so I search for raid settings in the BIOS. Set SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, and enter the "RAIDXpert2 config utility" in the advanced. Both drives shows as:

• Array 1, Non-RAID, 2 TB, Normal
• Array 2, Non-RAID, 2 TB, Normal

OK, they are not in RAID, check the "Array Management" menu, 'Create Array' is greyed out.

On "Physical Disk Management->Select Physical Disk Operations" there's and Initialize Disk options which fails saying "There are no disk that can be converted to RAID Disk(s)".

So after checking all the options -most of them are informative on controller/disks status-, the only one left to fiddle with, under the "Array Management" menu is labelled as 'Delete Array'.

It again shows the 2 driver (Array 1 Non-Raid / Array 2 Non-Raid) and lets you select any or both. Going forward throws a warning saying "Deleting an array will delete all of the data available on it, are you sure you want to delete the selected arrays?"

And here I'm stopping for today and asking for input. I guess once I've deleted the individual non-RAID array on each disk I could create one RAID -0- array selecting both disk -maybe initializing them before-. But I would had lost all the data, and will need to spend another 4 hours restoring the images again? Will the BIOS still recognize the drives are forming a RAID0 array?

God what an awful experience, I don't know how a consumer product ships with a RAID 0 configuration.

Thanks in advance to everyone that chips in!!!

[QQ02]

God what an awful experience, I don't know how a consumer product ships with a RAID 0 configuration.

---

Trust me, you are by far not the only one who wonders that. Especially a propriatary fake-RAID that AMD and Intel offer.

I had the opposite task I wanted to do with my Duo 16, undo the RAID 0 that was shipped without losing the partitions (including recovery). I did not have a 4TB drive at hand, so in-Windows stupid copy options were out and any off-Windows options on a stick could not read the ****** array. Reading it in other OS-s would require a special AMD or Intel driver (depending on computer) that is released for every motherboard, except ROG/ASUS does not release it for anything other than Windows. They used to for desktop motherboards, but not laptops. So trying to get the raw data off the original drives ended with me throwing out the towel, copying the files that I could out and then doing a fresh install of everything and losing the recovery partition. Because that is how ROG wanted it.

I am not familiar with Macrium, but I suspect that there is some boot sector trickery being pulled by the AMD RAID. The good thing is, creating or deleting the fake array in BIOS has no reason to overwrite everything on the drives so you could/should/might be okay with just saying they are part of a big array and the data remains intact and become legible for the computer. If the created array does not work, then I would not bet on doing another rewrite of the backed up drive images working on a second attempt. Not finding the array on the disk is a red flag to start with, so unless you accidentally swapped the two drives (put drive 1 in the drive 0 slot and vice versa, meaning the "first" drive it reads would have the "tail" of the arrray, don't take "tail" as anything even nearly literal as the data itself would be striped between the drives) I doubt there is a lot you can do beyond trying to recreate the array.

If you do somehow manage to get the data on the RAID array working, back it up and please for both of our sanities, nuke the RAID array again and start over clean. Or, after many years of use, get ready to repeat the process with a lot more data when you sense an SSD is getting close to failure. Also don't hope for any dual-booting as long as the array stands.

[AnotherRandomUs]

Hey! yeah I've found a few other threads with people complaining.

The thing is, in my case, the motherboard suddenly died, I had no chance to access the data inside the drives to back anything up. You were frustrated when you tried to remove the array keeping the restore partition, but imagine how happy I am, I've potentially lost everything.

In theory macrium imaged the drives doing a low level sector copy as the partition format was not recognized. I physically labelled the drives  left&right before processing the RMA, so now each has its corresponding image restored.

Problem is, as support did not restore the factory raid image, there isn't any RAID array configured in the BIOS/CMOS/whatever, and I learnt yesterday that setting the array up involves deleting the current drive level array/initializing the disk.

I could try do that and see if by deleting/initializing the drives and creating the array, the data itself is not erased -though the BIOS warns it would-. If it still does not boot up but at least the BIOS would had a RAID array configured, I could spend another 4 hours restoring images to the drives and see if that works, or else I'd be out of ideas and fear I've truly lost ~2.8Tb of data 😞

If there are admins populating the forums, please, help.

[QQ02]

Oh I fully comprehend your situation is much worse than mine. The ROG staff are usually on the ROG Care part of the forums: https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/gaming-notebooks/bd-p/HSS_Notebooks

Anbby in particular helped me with support (also had to get the motherboard replaced, but that was within the first weeks of having the laptop, no data loss to speak of back then).

[AnotherRandomUs]

Superb, thanks!! I'll ask Anbby if it's ok to move or duplicate this thread over Asus Care section.

I've also opened a support ticket pointing them to this thread hoping anybody with knowledge can guide me through the process.