SATA Drive Stopped Working - Cannot Initialize

nccookg

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Jan 19, 2012
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I had 2 WD blue internal hard drives (640 GB each) installed in a raid 0 config. It has worked fine for over a year. I stored photos and video on them. All of a sudden this does not show up in windows explorer anymore; it was drive letter D. Device manager says the device is working. I have checked for updated drivers and it says the one I have is correct. Disk manager says the disk is not initialized and when I try to initialize it I get a message saying initialization could not be done because of an I/O error.

What happened and what can I do to retrieve the files?

Thanks,
nccookg
 
Initializing/formatting the drive will destroy all data on the drive. Do this as a last resort. Go into the raid bios and make sure the array is listed as healthy and none of the drives have dropped out of the array. if one of the drives has dropped out you may be able to add it back in.

I hope you have good backups because RAID 0 has no redundancy. If one drive fails, you lose the data on all drives in the array.