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Scott Charles

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Raided Hard Drives "Locked" in Vista - Raid CArd Says Drives Are "Normal" and fine??

Had a blue screen incident from unplugging a dual monitor set-up.  When I rebooted I find that I am locked out of writing to a Drive which Vista sees as one drive, but which is a mirror raid on a Raid Card. The card dos-boot Utility says the drive is normal and fine, but I cannot write to the drive. I can read fine, I can play MP3's, open picture files, etc., but anything to write gives a message saying:

"The Disk is Write Protected. Remove the write-protection or use another disk."

Tried to go into the permissions and Admin (which I am), has full control, but others do not -when I try to add permissions I get another/similar error message saying "The media is write protected"

Appreciate any assistance.
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Kavostylin

Hi,

If you had a bluescreen error there would have been a dump file created.

Can you please attach the dump file so i can analyse it to tell you if the disconnection for the dual monitor was the case.

C:\windows\minidump\*date*.dmp

KAVO
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Hmmm...nothing with today's date..not even a 2009 file???  and I did wait for it to get to 100% and reboot itself?
Ok,

Problem seems to be MBR related. I would suggest purging the MBR or using a freeware tool like MBRFIX.
If you use the tool this is the method you will need to follow.

    * Download MBRFix.exe to your User folder
    * Boot the computer into a fresh session
    * Go to Start | All Programs | Accessories
    * Right-click on Command Prompt
    * Choose "Run as administrator"
    * Choose "Allow" from the UAC popup box (if you haven't turned it off)
    * At the C:\Users\{your name}\> prompt, type
      MBRFix /drive {drive number} fixmbr /yes
    * Repeat the command for however many drives are infected/write protected
    * Restart and check your antivirus or see if you are still unable to write to the drive

See if this works.

KAVO
In order to do that I will need to backup the drive first, if I can...because if I do that, I think I will loose the raid settings and need to rebuild the drive which will wipe out everything....

Still hoping this is just a flake setting within the registry or in a property box.

Saw some solutions that involved designators in the Registry, but they were for a different version of the operating system - not Vista X64...
This is secretly known issue with Vista x64.

I have spoke to several collegue's that have seen this happen before.

It shouldn't have any neagtive impact on your raid setup as MBR has no reference to raid configuration. for all intents and purposes the drive is 1 device.

Anyways
Okay, that would be good - going to try and backup - unfortunately, Ghost 14 sometimes has trouble "hooking up" with the raided drive and says the "state" has changed.....have to see if I can get it running - thanks
See how you go.

Another way you can do it is to just use the fdisk /mbr using the fdisk utility.
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Scott Charles

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