Cannot boot, black screen after Bios post.
 

Hello, first post :D

Well, i have an issue i need a bit of help with:

I installed a Raid 2+0 a couple of days ago with windows 7, and everything was working fine until today. I left my computer for a couple of hours and when i came back all i see is this black screen with a blinking cursor, then i tried everything on the bios but every time i tried to boot it kept stuck there, right after the bios POST.

Then i tried changing the SATA ports, that was something that fixed similar problems on my old Mobo, but this is strange because this mobo has 1 week, and the HD's (2x seagate 500gb) have 2 days, so they should be fine.

Then i tried with my ubuntu lucid lynx live cd, it has saved my life many times, it always works flawlessly and i thought i could use it to restore the boot files, but i was very surprised when it failed as well, it pops a message saying something like "invalid user pwsuid "user: unknown"{0}". Tried it many times with no luck, only that same message...:confused:

Now i managed to boot from a "slitaz" linux dist. thats about 30mb, it has many useful tools.

I can see the partitions/HD's on the Gparted and mount applications, but i still i havent managed to mount the raid i had on my Windows 7 install, im a bit scared of losing data, and i dont even know how to do it.

Is there any way to fix this from the slitaz live cd?

Maybe i could mount the Raid and then restore the Boot files from the slitaz live cd? I have a windows image i could use on the Raid, and i could copy the image files to a partition, make it primary, active and bootable...

I really dont know, maybe that wont help either because the ubuntu live cd couldnt boot, i really dont know what whats going on and what could be the cause of this... maybe a worm/virus?


Thank you very much for helping me out, if this is not the right section please let me know and ill contact a moderator to move it.

I assume you are using the onboard RAID controller (or a cheap one, e. g. less than 100 USD).
This means, your RAID functionality is provided by the driver, not the controller - in contrary to a "real" hardware raid which does the RAID processing by itself and gives a single drive to your OS.
This is also the reason why you do not see your RAID partition in linux - the drivers in the kernel do not support such driver-based raid. And they never will because linux can do its own raid with mdadm, lvm, etc.
Or you are using the windows software-based raid, done by the OS - which is also not supported by linux.

All this results in one conclusion: You cannot access your raid outside of windows. I would recommend you to build a Windows PE bootable disk (e. g. BartPE) with the raid-drivers you need. Or you install a fresh windows on another harddisk, install all necessary drivers for your raid and then plug-in your old harddisk. It should be readable.

Just some recommendations for the future:
If you really need a raid system, buy a hardware raid controller with xor-processor onboard OR buy a nas-system with raid. All other solutions are just crap.

I hope this will help you.

Thank you
 

Thank you very much for your answer, ill do what you said.