RAID partition disappears in WIN7

[TimLWard]

I am running WIN 7 and have a BIOstar TA870U3+ MB with onboard RAID controller. I built a raid 5 array with 3x2TB Seagate green drives. Everything ran fine until last week, I booted my system and Windows file manager did not show my D: (the raid 5 drive). The RAID bios shows the drives are fine and functional, but Win disk manager shows the logical disk as raw and wants to define the type and initialize it. What is the problem and how do I recover the data without restoring from backups?

Thanks Tim

 

[gansschlag]

The problem is that the file system on the RAID's volume was damaged, probalbly, the disk cache wasn't properly flashed to the disk during shut off. That quite often happens in Windows 7.
You may use Restorer Ultimate. First, scan the RAID's volume as it is now and see what can be found on it. If that proves unsuccessful, you'll have to disassemble the RAID and create virtual RAID, as it's shown in the help:Basic RAID 4 and RAID 5.

 

[TimLWard]

Thanks for the info. I currently have write caching turned on, since you say this happens often in Win 7 I am thinking I should turn off the caching and take a performance hit during the writes to avoid the performance hit of a corrupt array? I think I will download and try Restorer Ultimate Pro after I finish running the synchronization check on the array.

 

[TimLWard]

Best answer selected by TimLWard.