Accidently deleted RAID1 and MBR, and want to restore data and array

Nebulae

Honorable
Feb 8, 2013
5
0
10,510
I'm fairly new to RAID and I did something foolish that I should have left well alone. My RAID1 was showing "Degraded" in red before the POST, so I deleted it and rebuilt it. I also deleted the MBR from the second drive if I recall correctly. Now Disk Management says that it needs to be initialized. Naturally there are no drive letters on these disks anymore, and it shows the entire volume as available. There were 5 partitions and several hundred GB of precious data.

i5 3750 Ivy w/ Hyper 212 EVO
16GB Corsair Vengeance PC3 12800
Asus Sabertooth z77
OCZ Vertex 4 256GB (for Win7 and applications)
Radeon 7950
HighPoint Rocket 640L SATA RAID Controller, which is running:
(2) WD Caviar Blacks 2TB (not bootable, just data)

I unplugged one of the drives immediately so I couldn't screw it up. Then I ran Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery on the other drive. As far as I can tell it backed everything up, but I can't be certain because I can't remember every single folder. These are All my pictures of the kids, irreplaceable data, etc btw. Also, the folders are all lumped together instead of being organized in their respective partitions, and many of the "Date Created" were reset to the date I recovered them.

If the Degraded state means that one of the disks was corrupted, how do I know which one to back up? Should I check the total number of files and size for each and back them both up?

If I restore the MBR in pre-boot CTR-M mode, will my data be unaffected? I really don't know what the next course of action should be so I don't want to make it worse.

Thanks for any help in advance!
 
Solution
boy you really screwed up here.
1st step IMO is to disconnect the other raid1 drive and get your system back to a bootable state by booting up off of the startup disk and running startup repair. You may have to try it several times.

Once you get it back to a working state again. Install 1 of the data drives, do a check to see if your data is there and if so make a backup of it. So be prepared with an external drive or two or a whole lot of dvd's.

Disconnect that data drive and install the other one. Make another backup if your data is there but not to the same external as the first drive. You want another seperate backup copy

Once you have you data in a couple of different places you can now get back to figuring out which drive was...

popatim

Titan
Moderator
boy you really screwed up here.
1st step IMO is to disconnect the other raid1 drive and get your system back to a bootable state by booting up off of the startup disk and running startup repair. You may have to try it several times.

Once you get it back to a working state again. Install 1 of the data drives, do a check to see if your data is there and if so make a backup of it. So be prepared with an external drive or two or a whole lot of dvd's.

Disconnect that data drive and install the other one. Make another backup if your data is there but not to the same external as the first drive. You want another seperate backup copy

Once you have you data in a couple of different places you can now get back to figuring out which drive was having an issue (running many diagnostics, checking logs,...) and moving forward with some plan to proceed (replace 1 drive, replace both...) and getting your raid back (if you still want it)

Hopefully you see firsthand what we tell many people here: raid is not a backup. Its a stopgap to keep your system up in the event of a disk failure. Nothing more.
You are only as protected as your last backup.
 
Solution

Nebulae

Honorable
Feb 8, 2013
5
0
10,510
Thanks for your responses. Popatim my OS drive wasn't on the raid array so it's unaffected, thus my system is up and running fine. I restored 1 of the data drives, so I'll hook the other one back up and restore it, then compare the 2 for discrepancies of data. I don't have enough room to back it up twice, so I guess I'll pick up a stack of bd-r's.

I was going to burn everything soon anyway once I got my files organized a little better! If I initialize either of the data drives, or reset the mbr will that wipe them?
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
mbr's (Master Boot Record) are what tells the OS how to boot. Sometimes they get written to the wrong drive, like your data drive, if its present in the system when you install windows. If you remove the drive with the MBR you will no longer boot and be forced to recreate it so I'm confused by what your saying in regards to the MBR.

You are only as protected as your last backup. In your case you could be on the verge of loosing all your data. Backing it up should be your highest priority.