Mobo Raid 5, OS drive fails (help)

[afrobacon]

As I am not very familiar with raid in general, I was looking to see what situation I just got into.

I have an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe and decided to use their software to put a raid 5 together. I have 3x 750gb drives in the raid, then a 250gb to run the OS.

<long story>
Well, just today the 250gb drive decided to stop working. I first booted up before work and heard a bunch of racket inside the case. Naturally I investigated, first checking fans, then checking HDD's. That when I found the 250gb was making all the noise. With little time to spend diagnosing the problem and backing up everything on the drive, I just grabbed the needed work files and took off. Came back home later to a "BOOT DISK FAILURE."
</long story>

So, I was wondering, before I break things any further, what the best path is to take from here. If possible is there a way to recover data from the 250gb? How do I recover my raid?

Thanks for any and all help.
-AfroBacon

 

[arson94]

If I'm not mistaken, even using the software to construct the RAID, the RAID configuration should still be on the RAID controller. So once you get your OS back up and running, you should be able to reinstall the RAID software and it should be able to detect your already configured RAID and it should all still be intact.

As far as the 250GB, since you heard it making all that racket, it possibly failed, mechanically. However, you can still slave it into another computer and see it can be recognized, installed, and accessed. If it can, I'd pull off all your data that you can while it's still working. Then reinstall your OS on it and see how it works.

If the drive can't be accessed or recognized, then you'd have to resort to other means like replacing the controller board on the hard drive or maybe sending it off to have the data recovered if it's important enough because it can be expensive.

However, even though it was making noise, doesn't necessarily mean the drive itself failed. Could have been anything, and maybe the controller board died. The controller board can be replaced with another controller from an identical or at least closely resembling drive as the original.

I'd try slaving it into another computer to try to access all your data for backup, and if that works, reinstall the OS once your data is backed up and see how the drive fairs. If that doesn't work, try replacing the controller board - which is the board on the bottom of the drive which houses all the ports for the drive. If that still doesn't work, then you may have to resort to third party data recovery. Your RAID SHOULD remain intact, but software RAID's have always been iffy for me and sometimes mine have failed for no reason and I've lost everything before. But it should remain intact until you reinstall your OS and the RAID software. Good Luck.

If anybody sees anything wrong with my reponse, pelase correct me. My statements are from my own experience with RAIDs I've done in the past. I'm not a RAID expert by any means.