Asus mobo BIOS upgrade loses Intel RAID-configuration
Monday, October 20. 2014
One of these days, I went to see if my motherboard has a newer BIOS. It had, and since I had not upgraded the BIOS after building my PC, I chose to go for upgrade.
This is one of the newer model PCs. You download the file, put it into a FAT-32 formatted USB-stick. Reboot the computer and enter UEFI-setup screens. One of them has an option to display the contents of the USB-stick and load the file, upgrade the BIOS and ... reset the settings and reboot. Wait a minute! Did I just say reset the settings. Yes.
Guess what happened to my Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID-1 -setup. 
Crapper! I didn't see that one coming. Now I remember again why I typically don't use motherboard "fake" RAIDs. Also, by the looks of it I wasn't alone with this: RAID1 changed to AHCI after BIOS update. Also, somebody with a Dell computer was experiencing something similar in the Intel's own discussion boards: Raid 1 rebuild with Rapid Storage Technology. I checked the manuals Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) User guides, but didn't see anything that would help. Self-help seems always to be the best option anyway.
I turned the S-ATA mode back to RAID:
... but trying to re-create the RAID-1 volume seemed a bit dangerous:
The part where it says "Warning: All data on selected disks will be lost" kind of gets my attention. I didn't want to go that way.
Booting to Windows worked. Looks like drive(s) don't have any headers and if necessary, can act as a single drive:
Naturally when Windows sees two drives instead of one, it means that there is no RAID. To get this one fixed I started Interl Rapid Storage Technology user interface. It has the option to create RAID volume on RAID-ready drives:
More importantly, it has the possibility of not erasing data on a single disc:
When accepted, the rebuild process starts. It will migrate data for hours:
When it finishes, there will be only one drive left:
As the end result, the BIOS was upgraded, RAID-1 was rebuilt and I was happy again. All it took was 6 hours of rebuild time and a lot of stress! 
