This is sort of baffling me. A computer we manage had a series of failures causing one of the hard drives (SATA Port 0) to fail. The drive still recognizes that there is an OS on it but fails to boot citing "system32/config/system" is corrupt.
The hard drive in Port 1. When using the mirrored drive in Port 1 to boot it gets to Windows but cannot finish logon. It attempts to log in, fails then logs out (no displayed error, just Log in -> Log out).
If both drives are inserted however the boot works. Intel Matrix Storage Manager recognizes the SATA Port 0 drive as RAID but SATA Port 1 as Non-raid. The Raid volume is recognized as degraded.
At this point I'm lost. I have a replacement drive but cannot boot either drive to the OS alone to start a recovery to the new drive. Windows boot disk does not seem to work, it fails out with BSOD before allowing me to execute a repair. Executing chkdsk on either drive does not resolve the issue.
What steps do I need to take from here to recover my data and have the bad drive removed without losing any data?
Best Answer
Take a backup. Destroy the RAID array. Build a new RAID array. Restore from a known-good backup. If desired, restore selected files from the new backup.
It's likely too late to just replace the failed drive. You pretty much have to do that immediately if you're going to expect it to work.