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I recently upgraded1 the PC's Windows 7 OS from 32-bit to 64-bit. This was after running MS' Upgrade Advisor and receiving an 'all clear' on the hardware.

There is a 2 x 2TB drive array set up as a mirrored RAID using the 32-bit OS. The drives don't show in Windows 7 64-bit and when I view the device listing in the Disk Management applet they appear as 'foreign' drives that cannot be imported. I also have a Ubuntu OS (pretty certain it is a 32-bit flavor) installed that can bind to the drives successfully.

At the moment I am back using Windows 7 32-bit so I can back-up the content on the RAID array. The plan is to format the drives using the 64-bit OS and fill them from the back-up. However this seems like an unnecessary hassle, and I'm worried that after doing so, the Ubuntu OS will not be able to access them (I'd like a dual boot system).

Why would the 2x 32-bit OS' be able to access the mirrored RAID set-up by Windows 7 32-bit, but Windows 7 64-bit is unable to access it? Am I doing something wrong, should Windows 7 64-bit be able to access the drives?

More information can be made available as needed, but it might have to wait for this back-up to finish before I can swap back to another OS.

Drives/Motherboard

Drives. 2 x WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 ATA Device (Western Digital 2TB).

Motherboard. The drives are the 2nd & 3rd plugged into an ASRock G41M-VS3 R2.0 motherboard.

1: Not so much an upgrade as separate installations. I have the OS' installed on separate drives at the moment, and can swap between them.

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What controller are you using? – David Schwartz Sep 27 '11 at 5:53
Maybe you need the 64bit raid driver to see them. – Moab Sep 27 '11 at 5:55
@David Sorry I don't know. How do I find out? – Andrew Thompson Sep 27 '11 at 5:58
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Some 64-bit driver that happens to work with your controller probably came with the OS. But it could, for example, be a minimal AHCI driver that doesn't support RAID. – David Schwartz Sep 27 '11 at 6:52
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This motherboard has no RAID support. – David Schwartz Sep 27 '11 at 6:57
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Most likely the disks were formatted in some form of a Vendor's software RAID and not the standard Windows software RAID. The disks are marked to keep Windows from trying to use them without the appropriate INF Files / Driver. Did you move these drives from another system perhaps?

Probably best to recreate them as a standard Windows software RAID set to avoid the same problem if they get moved to another system again.

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