RAID Status Failed

[fishquail]

Can anyone Please help me? The information on the RAID couldn't be more important to my life and i must get it back working

Here is a picture of my raid manager screen;

So I had a healthy RAID volume consisting of 4 drives in RAID 0. (stripe). But I am afraid i may have made a terrible mistake.
For reasons i will not go into yet, I selected "Set to Safe Defaults" in the bios. -I was Not thinking this would have anything to do with the RAID. When I rebooted to windows i realized the RAID array was not showing up. and then Detect new hardware came on. I restarted back to bios and realized i had to re-enable and change the item; "SATA RAID / AHCI mode = [ RAID ].
I restarted and now the boot screen reads Raid status as "FAILED". I press CTRL+I to enter the Intel Matrix storage manager.

Under Disk volume information; It reads the stripe as the name i gave it but says Status "Failed".

Looking at the specific disks it reads that Disk on Port 2 as "Non-RAID Disk" when it should be a "Member disk" as the rest of the drives are listed as. How do i get this to be listed as a Member disk?

Can anyone Please help me?

MB = GA-X38-DQ6
CPU = intel q6600
RAM = 8GB corsair
GPU = HD4850

 

[sub mesa]

Want to recover your data using Linux or BSD? I can help you with that, should make a full recovery. You have all the data you need: disk order and stripesize; that's enough to re-create the RAID under a different operating system (windows doesn't have advanced RAID functionality) like BSD. Assuming the NTFS partition containing your files is not damaged, you should be able to make a full recovery. The upside from this method is that its of no further risk to your array; there will be no writes to the physical disks so its a safe option to try.

Another option would be using software like RAID reconstructor. Its often not free and doesn't always work, but should be able to do about the same thing. The problem is that windows tries to write to any volume you insert, so you can loose data forever if you are not careful.

If its critical data, i suggest you leave an expert to handle this. But i've recovered lots of broken onboard RAID0 and RAID5 under BSD.

 

[fishquail]

Thanks,

So i Bought Raid Reconstructor and GetDataBack programs for $200. I ran the 'Raid Reconstructor' on the 4 drives for 8 hours and then ( it seemed ) to work! All my files were showing up just as i remember them! However, I was disappointed to realize that after i copied the files to a new folder (on another drive ) and tried to open them up - they were All Truncated. Photos would open with only partial data -scan lines threw them - or not open at all. It was as if all the files were missing 25 % of the data from them to make complete.

After that, i opened up Disk management to look at the 4 hard drives. I am surprised to see that ( of the 4 drives ) not all of them are listed the same!? Two of them are listed as ONLINE" and two are listed as Not initialized:" And one of them says Online".

I'm not sure how it got like this. Maybe when VISTA ( my other system drive ) booted it initialized one of them automatically?.. ( i may have restarted before it could initialize the other disks... Anyway, - Do you think I need to INITIALIZE all of the Disks and then Try the Raid reconstructor again? I am hoping the data may be complete then and not Truncated. ???

This is a screengrab of Raid reconstructor with all the files listed however they were truncated or incomplete when i tried to open them.

 

[sub mesa]

Oh no don't initialize them, you overwrite and corrupt your RAID that way. I offered to save your data with the use of free software, but it will be impossible if you initialize your disks because that would overwrite data that is on the disk and full recovery could be impossible. Also there would be damage to the filesystem, so utilities in Linux/BSD might be less happy to copy the data off your RAID volume.

Hope it's not too late.

 

[sub mesa]

Also, truncated seems that you used a wrong stripe size, did you play with those settings? In any case, do not write to your disks. You would make recovery impossible that way.

 

[fishquail]

I did not Initialize the Disks myself, but I'm afraid two of them got Initialized on its own. Perhaps it was when i opened VISTA and it may have automatically started initializing disks on its own? I restarted after i noticed the pop ups in the bottom Right corner telling me it was detecting new hardware...

In any case two of the disks are listed as already initialized so too late for that. However, none of them have been formated or anything.

 

[fishquail]

I am getting contradicting information... I was told on another forum that I SHOULD Initialize all my drives before i attempt the Raid Reconstructor program.

???

 

[sub mesa]

Initializing a disk means windows did not found a valid partition block on the disk, like is the case with normal harddisks. Windows will not write or do anything stupid while the disk is 'uninitialized' - after all they may have been part of a RAID array or some OS microsoft doesn't know about.

In a RAID0 array, the first disk in the RAID will contain the partition block. This means windows will see a partition on this disk (i.e. it doesn't show as uninitialized). But the other disks should show as uninitialized since they don't contain a valid partition block. If you initialize them, you will overwrite otherwise good data, and recovery of that data will be impossible. Don't trust the advice you got on that other forum, it would be the most stupid thing you could do in this case.

 

[fishquail]

OK, thanks. That makes scene for how its showing up then. I have not initialized any disk myself.

I would love to try your method you speek of - using BSD? - but ive never used anyting like that and not really sure what the processs your sugesting for me to somehow run another OS... if thats what your saying?

My other option was to send all the drives to a data recovery place but starting cost is 1500$. I would like to investigate all other options before i go that route just as long as im sure im not damaging the data doing so...

 

[sub mesa]

You would need an extra harddrive that you can use to install BSD on. Until then, you should physically disconnect your RAID-drives and any other drives to prevent any accidents from destroying your data. If you have a spare HDD, you can download this file, burn it to a cd and boot your computer with it, then perform a standard installation.

ISO-file to download: ftp://ftp.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/7.2/7.2-RC1-i386-disc1.iso

I'll write down a short version of what you should do to perform this procedure:
- boot from ISO
- menu appears and counts down to zero, press enter or let it reach zero
- new colored menu appears, the FreeBSD installation menu. Select Standard
- select the disk you are going to install to (might not display if it found just one disk; be sure to disconnect any data disks to avoid any mistake here!)
- once you get the black screen called fdisk, press 'c' and it has filled in a number for you, press enter, then press 'q'. It asks you what kind of boot block you want, select 'Standard'.
- then it will show you the disklabel menu, allowing you to create filesystems. Simply press 'a' will use automatic settings, press 'q' after to go to the next screen
- next is the distribution menu, asking what needs to be installed. scroll down to "Minimum" and select it with the space bar. Now go to the option below it called "Custom" and hit space bar again. In the new menu that appears, select the "man" option, which installs manpages. Then just press ESC (escape) twice; it should ask you for the installation source. the first option is to install from CD/DVD so simply press enter.
- on any question that follows, answer no, except the question if we want to enable SSH login (say yes) and the option to try DHCP on our network interface. Don't be too worried you make mistakes here. As long as you get the thing installed -- you don't need it afterwards.

If you got FreeBSD installed and you can boot with it, you should login (with username "root") and see if it has got an IP address (check with 'ifconfig'). If it has, you can tune your network configuration to allow incomming connections on TCP port 22 to the BSD machine. That would allow me to login remotely and setup things. Once that works, you can shutdown the system and start connecting the data disks. Once BSD is booted with the data disks online, it should only take half an hour for me to gain access to the volume. You can use the network to copy the information.

So for this to work you need:
- multiple PCs is really a must
- have a spare HDD
- be able to open a port (lookup on port forwarding is this is new for you)
- equal storage space on any networked computer to hold the data that is on the RAID0-volume; this may be a windows machine with windows filesharing enabled. It can also be an empty local harddisk or several of them.
- last but not least, this procedure implies that you trust me to handle your data. I won't have to see any of the contents of the RAID-volume, though. So i won't have to see any privacy-sensitive data.
- a few hours of time setting up that BSD thing

 

[sub mesa]

Just to be sure you understand: after the recovery you won't need the BSD thing anymore. It's just useful because BSD has its own RAID-implementations (RAID0 through RAID5) and i've used those in the past to recover files from onboard RAID used in combination with Windows.

 

[fishquail]

Thanks man,
While I certainly appreciate all the help you've given me i think that process is beyond what i can do now. but thanks for explaining it.
I don't have a spare hard drive right now to instal it.
Humm... but thanks again for wanting to try it.