Windows 8.1 has a catastrophic bug regarding hard disks that really needs to be addressed and corrected.
There are 1000s if not 10s of 1000s of internet threads with people experiencing the same problem. Its amazing this problem has been around for years. Several versions of windows has this problem.
I upgraded my BIOS and the BIOS upgrade software didn't save the cmos settings. My SATA disk controller was previously programmed with a RAID 10 configuration in hardware. What happened was the Controller defaulted to non-RAID. Windows in its attempt
to be smart ended up being really incredibly stupid. Windows assumed the hardware configuration was correct and the RAID disk configuration was wrong so Windows decided to corrupt and wipe out my Master Boot Records without my permission. It made
2 disks of the 4 disk RAID into non-RAID disks and zeroed out the MBR of the RAID partition.
Windows should never assume the hardware is correct and the disks are wrongly configured. In my case it was just the opposite my disks were correctly configured and the hardware was incorrect. This is a catastrophic bug with Windows. Windows
should never automatically change the MBR without user permission. Windows could put up an interactive screen to let users know there maybe something incorrect with the hardware settings to give user a chance to correct issue before destroying
perfectly good disks. Microsoft should correct this error with a patch and future versions.
The software should allow users the option to save the MBR information to USB flash prioer to overwriting with the ability for the user to revert back by reloading the saved MBR information. This kind
of software should not be difficult for the Windows developers to do. Please forward to the Windows software engineers to see if they can close this bug.
The question is how can I get my 4 RAID disks MBRs repaired so the RAID 10 will work again?
I have 4 new virgin disks of same size, brand and can re-install those and redo the RAID 10. IF I save the MBR info for the RAID10 physical disk can I write the MBR info to the old disks and zero out the MBR of the 2 non-RAID disks? Will that allow me to salvage my RAID 10?
I can manually hand edit the values via a disk editor.
For a RAID10 DISK0 DISK1 DISK2 DISK3
I know the first DISK0 there is a MBR and some start end cylinder info.
DISK0 MBR Does DISK 1 , DISK 2 and DIKS 3 have anything in their MBR for a RAID or are these values zero?