How to repair RAID 5

[CKLayoka]

I use RAID 5 on 4 640 GB harddrives. One of the drives "fell out" of RAID recently. I chose 5 with the backup in mind, so i know I can repair it without a full reformat. How do I do that? Tried the RAID option ROM at boot (after POST) and their is absolutely no mention of repairing or otherwise.

I gotta end that "Status Critical" warning and fix this. I have a system image on an external, so I am invulnerable to data loss, but I'd hate to have to rebuild the RAID and reinstall windows.

It is onboard ASUS Raid (Mobo M4A79T Deluxe). I use Windows 7 x64.
Thanks.

 

[sub mesa]

RAID5 is not a backup; it is redundnancy. RAID5 on Windows can also be less reliable than a single disk without RAID at all; the RAID layer itself can fail, and that's exactly what happened to you (and another million sufferers).

Try to boot Ubuntu Linux, click Places, Click Home, click "..GB Filesystem" on the left. If you can get access to your data copy it over to a REAL backup and re-setup the original drives.

I highly recommend ZFS to protect your data. Its alot more safe than RAID5 under Windows. FreeNAS is an easy FreeBSD-based NAS that incorporates ZFS. You may wish to re-arrange the way your storage is setup at this point.

 

[CKLayoka]

May is a busy month for me, so this sounds like a summer project. I'd be totally open to trying this ZFS thing in a month or so. So, is it like, RAID drivers used to make the array on which Windows (and other OS) is operated?
Also, I think you might misunderstand my situation--I can still boot Windows just fine. I know that RAID isn't a backup, just redundancy against HDD failure. Like I said, I have conventional, external backups of all my important files.
I'm just curious about repairing my existing setup, at least temporarily