RAID 5 DISAPPEARED! Please Help!

[emitskatan]

Hey guys,

I'm having a big problem with my RAID 5.

The quick version: I have two installs of Vista Ultimate 64 bit on separate disks. Both are detecting my 4TB RAID 5 (2.73TB usable) in Device Manager, Disk Management (though its only showing as 2048GB with 746.54GB unallocated, it also does not have a drive letter), and in Nvidia Control Panel Media Shield. But not in windows explorer. I'm trying to back up my RAID, but don't know how to get to the files.

My system setup:
Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU 9650 3GHz Quad Core
EVGA 790i SLI motherboard
2x EVGA 9800 GX2
4GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
300GB WD Velociraptor (Vista Ultimate 64bit)
1TB Seagate (Vista Ultimate 64bit)
4TB RAID 5 (no OS)

The detailed Version: I've been upgrading my computer a couple times a month lately, adding small things. I had finally finished my last upgrade: a 300GB WD Velociraptor drive. I wanted to use this as the system disk and my 4TB raid 5 as storage. I was going to a LAN party and the last time we had problems with Vista so I installed XP 32bit in the new 10k rpm drive and left vista (which I built the RAID with) on my spare 1TB drive. This is where I first noticed a problem. Windows XP could see my Vista drive but did not have my Raid 5 in the windows explorer or in the disk management, it did show up in media shield and device manager though. It worked fine on my Vista disk, so I just used that for access to my RAID. At this point I should have backed up everything on my RAID, but I had just assumed it was a problem with the XP install. LAN party was great, came home and started working on creating a second partition on the raptor drive for Vista. I had some problems when I put XP and vista on the same drive before so I tried using vcom system commander on the raptor drive. It wouldn't load my vista 64 bit DVD so I decided to forget about XP all together and booted from the Vista disk, cleared off the raptor completely and installed Vista onto it. I didn't bother to load the RAID drivers cause it detected the 1TB and raptor drive fine. It copied the files over and when it went to restart it blue screened with a raid.sys (not exact name of file) in the text. This had happened before and everything had been fine so i just reset and it went about setting up vista. When it started up I checked for the RAID and it wasn't there. I loaded all the drivers and did all the updates but it still didn't appear. So I figured I'd just back up everything on my RAID and rebuild it from scratch. I opened up the 1TB drive that had access to it before, but it is doing the same thing the raptor drive is doing! Shows up everywhere except windows explorer, and in Disk Management it doesn't have a drive letter, has 746.54GB unallocated (had done this before when i had an OS on it a few months ago, it was because a drive with a MBR can only be 2TB), It was only using 1.2TB of the Raid so it might still be fine that it cut some of it out.

I do have lots of the important stuff backed up on another comp, but its about a month old and there is a lot of new stuff that I don't want to lose.

Is there any way to get it working in windows explorer without formatting/rebuilding?
If I cleared the raptor, would it fix the 1TB vista? (doubt it)
If I cleared the raptor and installed vista again, loading the drivers before install, would it show up in windows explorer?

Basically any ideas of how I can get access to my RAID would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your time guys

 

[emitskatan]

Found my own solution, just posting incase someone else runs into the same problem.

I was able to use GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/) to scan the Raid, as nothing was physically wrong with it. I copied the files from it to several smaller drives. I'm rebuilding the RAID now in the raptor's OS, and I'll copy everything back onto the RAID and keep the 1TB drive aside as a replacement for the RAID or a backup if I need. Hope this helps anyone else that a similar problem.

 

[mike99]

Are you using Raid controller on motherboard? At POST, is RAID reported as good? I assume array is 5 x 1Tb drives. You ARE using NTFS?. Have you gone into RAID setup and checked status?

Mike

 

[emitskatan]

Yes, it is the onboard RAID. It appeared as healthy on POST. Everything looked fine in RAID setup (except it had bootable checked off). The Array is 4x 1TB with another 1TB and 300GB Raptor as system drives. All drives are using NTFS.

 

[mike99]

If I cleared the raptor and installed vista again, loading the drivers before install, would it show up in windows explorer?

That sounds the best solution. The installer often finds drives that are not detected by XP or Vista during the second stage of the install. Don't forget to load the motherboard drivers.
What does Drivemanager show the 3Tb array as? See if there is any option to take ownership, or assign a driveletter without reformat.

Mike.

 

[emitskatan]

Yea I gave that a try, but when I loaded the drivers for the vista install it only displayed the 700ish GB that was un-allocated. The drive manager had shown the Raid as 2TB (unable to do anything with it except help) with no drive letter, and the left over 700ish GB, also unable to do anything with except access help.