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Reformatted system drive, now trying to recognize media drives
We just had to reformat the system drive on one of our MCA’s…one of our tech’s just reinstalled windows and now there’s no trace of the the Avid media drives. I thought my media drives would just show up as a secondary set of drives and all my media would be intact, but apparently thaat’s not the case. We have a 1 TB array of Avid Ultra 320 LVD SCSI drives. I don’t know a lot about SCSI drives and how they interface with Windows, but is there a way to bring those drives back to life w/out having to re-stripe them and lose all of my media? We have a MCA on and XP workstation. Thanks in advance for any advice.
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6 Replies
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A little more info on my previous post-
I posted a thread about a week ago about having really messed something up with Avid, I couldn’t even get the software to open. I talked to a few people and the consensus was, that I needed to back up my project files and reformat the system drive and reinstall Windows. I thought I’d be able to do this, and the media on my Avid drives would be OK. We’d just reformat, after which the media drives would just show up again as additional drives, reinstall Avid, and drop the project files back in the MCA projects folder…and voila- everything would relink, Avid would rebuild the database files, and things would be back to normal.
Apparently though, it’s not that easy. After reinstalling windows the system isn’t seeing my Avid drives and according to my tech, who knows computers- but not much about Avid- we have to reformat the external Avid drives in order for windows to recognize them. Is this the case? Or is there some other way I can get the system to recognize those drives without wiping them and losing almost a TB and 4 projects worth of OMF media files. As I said in the previous post, the external Avid drives I have are a stack of about 8 ultra 320 LVD SCSI drives. I believe they’re set up as raid 0 and show up in Windows as two seperate drives.
I know I should have backed up my media, but I had no way of backing up almost a TB of data. After this though, you can bet I’ll be getting a couple of external HDD’s. Sorry for the length of this post…I wanted to try to give the best explanation I could. I know I’ve probably been a little redundant, but I’m kinda freaking out here. What I thought would be a relatively painless process is looking like it’s going to cost me a lot of work. Thanks much for any advice.
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I’m not sure of an answer, but I do know this:
DO NOT REFORMAT YOUR MEDIA DRIVES!!!
Maybe some wise sage will come up with an answer, but I personally do not believe you need to go to the extreme of reformatting your drives. My guess is there is a very simple answer to get your drives to show up. Unless you are under a severe time crunch, don’t do it. Resist your tech’s advice and work the OS issue. Have you reinstalled the Avid software yet? What about the drive utilities? Are you on the correct service pack for your MCA version?
Jon
“The Almighty tells me He can get me out of this mess. But He’s pretty sure you’re F%$#*D!”
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what do you see when you try to map a network drive?
you say there not showing up…..do you mean you can’t see the stripe….or you can see anything?????
reformat in this case should be the last thing you try and you should have tried everything before that and also developed a slight twitch combined with an alcohol hobby.
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I think you have to install the RAID drivers before you install the OS, but I could be wrong. Ask your Tech Guy if the proper drivers are installed, and if they were install before the OS.
I won’t be at work again until Monday but I’ll ask our IT guy about it. Knowledgable about these things, he is.
Mike.
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OK guys, thanks for the input…I figured it out. And as suspected, it was something simple.
I’m glad I stepped in before my tech guy and all his infinite wisdom striped the drives- which he wouldn’t have been able to do anyway, since Window didn’t even see the drives. After re-installing the OS, he didn’t install the SCSI controller drivers. I went to the ctrl panel and opened the device manager, and when I saw a bunch of question marks and exclamation points beside the SCSI adapters, I realized that he had only installed the OS and no drivers. I found them on the HP site, installed them and now the media drives are back online and all my media is still intact and healthy. Now I just have to find the rest of the drivers for the system since he apparently misplaced the HP restoration disc for the system that had all of the drivers on it. Anyway, thanks for all your advice. I’ll sleep a little easier tonight. 🙂
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Hooray! Happy you aren’t starting back at square one with days of digitizing ahead of you. Best of luck!
Mike.
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