Raid 10 Failure. Recovery?? I need HELP PLEAASEE

[Dannydepac]

Hello eveyone... Let me start by thanking you for help in advance... and also please understand that
I KNOW NOW THAT I SHOULD HAVE BEEN BACKING UP MY STUFF ALL ALONG!!!!! MY DAD HAS BEEN LECTURING ME ABOUT IT FOR YEARS ha.

So the back story:

I had a Raid 10 (4 western digital caviar 160gb) that was beginning to tell me at startup that something was wrong yet it kept working fine...I thought it was just an error by the raid controller and I was planning on fixing it soon (I swear, I even had the replacement drive).

I decided for other reasons my computer needed more memory so I bought some but it was a higher voltage so I changed my voltage in the bios ... long story short somewhere along the way I must have fried the Motherboard because it first stopped letting me into windows and then eventually wouldn't post at all.

So I bought an exact copy of the motherboard to get back into my raid (and hopefully copy the files off of it) but it's stalling on windows loadup (at storport.sys) I loaded windows successfully on another boot drive to try to run a recovery program but it's not seeing my raid within the recovery programs... I'm out of ideas... any suggestions? or good raid recovery program suggestions?

I'd rather not pay one of these data recovery companies $1000 plus to get back my files... there very important to me but I'm not sure they're a grand worthy... Thanks in advance and enjoy your weekend.

 

[ordcestus]

Your raid was destroyed getting the exact same type of board would not help. You can call your hard drive or motherboard manufacturer and ask them for software recomendations.

Your data is still there and it is recoverable unfortunatly it may require a computer forensics expert to recover the data

And i'm gonna lecture you anyway cause you need it. BACK UP YOUR FILES! Use an automatic solution like carbonite if you can't remember to keep backing up your stuff. And why didn't you listen when your computer told you something was wrong? That should have been when you backed up "just in case". And next time you screw around with voltages make sure all your parts can handle it including the cooling load.

 

[sub mesa]

Download and burn Ubuntu, boot from it, now open home folder and see if your RAID array is clickable on the left side of the screen. If you can see your data and files, you can copy then off to network or another local disk.

Assuming your array is degraded, this may actually mean corruption. Since you continue to worked when you said it would display an error with the RAID; i'm assuming that means you continued working on it while it being degraded. That means that the 2 mirror devices had no function at all and you were running a RAID0 of 2 disks intead of a RAID10 with 4 disks.

So it could be there is filesystem damage, and it would go horribly wrong if the driver tries to syncronise the mirror with old/stale data.

The Ubuntu trick may yet work though. Read a bit more here:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-252965_14_0.html#t1781278

 

[Jim_L9]

When you loaded Windows on the other boot drive did you install the RAID drivers?