Raid 1 failed...need urgent help, drives aren't working!

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Austinwangg

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Dec 29, 2012
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Okay guys...pretty frustrated here.

So I have a software raid array (from disk management) and apparently it failed.

Yesterday I opened up "My Computer" to check my raid drive (two 1Tb seagate barracudas), and it disappeared. I then went into my bios and both drives were still there. I went to sleep after that, since it was very late.

Next day, I open up my bios and only one of the drives is there, and it is no longer in disk management.

Here's what I tried:

1) Using a SATA -> USB converter. This resulted in the drive showing up in disk management, but it says "dynamic" and "invalid." I tried using some software to change it back into a basic disk, but that did not work.

2) Plug the hard drive into another computer, which just made my Windows 7 unbootable for some reason.

3) Try different SATA ports on the existing motherboard.

Oh yeah, and when I plug in the hard drive now, it cannot get past the Windows 7 boot screen with the glowing Windows logo.


Any suggestions? -- Please be explicit so I can try out a solution instead of me having to ask how to do actually carry out the solution.

Update: Using the existing motherboard, I booted up the drive. Now it wants me to format it in disk management but it is only 128Gb while my drive is 1Tb...not sure what to do. It is "unkown" and "not initialized." It says there is a problem with the I/O when i try initializing it. Screenshot: http://puu.sh/iFqfu/0a3ccb36bb.png

Thanks!
 
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Deuce65

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Oct 16, 2013
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Looking at the image, it appears that you have a separate boot drive from the array, and the array is setup through Windows. If that is the case, you should be able to simply break the mirror and boot with neither of those disks connected (disconnected from the SATA ports). Once that is done, just try each disk separately to see which is causing the problem. With that said, it is probably faster to simply wipe the array and restore from backup, since it isn't the boot disk.

As an aside, I would suggest that unless you really can't afford for the system to be down for a few hours no matter what, you probably would be better off without the mirror to begin with. And that if you do really need 100% uptime, a dedicated controller card may be a sensible investment.
 
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Austinwangg

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Dec 29, 2012
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Yes, I'm working on getting a controller.

I unplugged both, checked disk management and nothing was there.

Then I plugged in each drive individually and it is just appearing as the "update" that I posted on the bottom of my post. Is there no way to restore my data if I have no backup?
 
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Austinwangg

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Dec 29, 2012
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I've already tried both drives individually, as stated in my post.

How do I unmark this as the solution?
 
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Deuce65

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Then probably not. The good news is that your data is almost certainly there, and would be a good candidate for data recovery.
 
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S Haran

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Jul 12, 2013
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If drives are reporting the wrong size and freezing Windows then it's likely you are dealing with failing drives.

Check the SMART info on the drives with CrystalDiskInfo. Another idea is to try and access the drives from Linux.

With RAID1 you only need one working drive for recovery.
 
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Austinwangg

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Dec 29, 2012
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Is there a guide as to how I could access it from Linux?
 
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