Hard drives trushed after Intel RST drivers installed

[cyber-flyer]

I need help. After migrating to new motherboard (Gigabyte z170) everything looked good until I have installed Intel RST drivers(that came with installation disk for the motherboard). Following Intel RST install 2 out of 3 drives became unusable in a way that I have never seen before. To make it worse one of the drives was my back up HDD, so I can't get my data back.
I am really looking for advice here before biting the bullet and paying for recovery solution.

Here are details of the sytem:
3 SATA drives with Intel motherboard running Windows 10.
#1 is bootable 120 gb SSD that holds Win 10.
#2 500gb HDD with all user data
#3 500gb HDD that was back up of #2.
All drives were configured as AHCI drives on old and new motherboard. All drives are visible in BIOS of the new motherboard. Drives #2 and #3 were part of Raid-0 array which I have dismantled 4 yrs ago and created the current configuration .

The symptoms: following Intel RST install #2 and #3 drives started to show old directory structure (from Raid-0 days) with none of the shown files actually existing. Any attempt to read the files produces an error.
Rolling back to Win 10 standard AHCI drivers and reconnecting to old motherboard did not help.
Running deep scan EaseUS partition table recovery does not show correct partitions.
File recovery sees correct files but it sees 100,000 of them - it will be a hard job sorting them out and renaming properly.
Any suggestions please?

 

[popatim]

Check the bios and see if RST enabled raid mode on your sata ports. If so disable them, though I suspect you already checked that.

While its ok to have a 'hot' backup drive in your pc. This drive needs to come after having an offline backup. By 'offline' I mean one that is not connected to anything; power, data, or telephone...; after the backup is made. it can be optical disks, flash drives/media, external drives, tapes.

What you are experiencing is one of the reasons why sadly.

Remove one disk and set it aside so that you have less risk of complete data loss.
I'd suggest purchasing another backup drive. An Internal drive with an external enclosure would be my choice.
While I think that recovering the drive structure is improbably at this point, its worth trying other software such as testdisk. You might even want to try putting the sata ports in ide/compatibility mode if you can and see if that gets different results. we dont know what mode the old motherbd was in do we?
Install your new disk into the pc before running testdisk or any further recovery attempts. Perform a sector backup/image of the problem drive. (ease todo backup or macrium reflect free editions might still do this if you need software). Run file recovery from the old drive to the new drive. rescue your most important files types first. 1st pass might be recover all image to the image folder, 2nd pass grab videos to the videos folder. 3rd pass grab all document types. Repeat rescuing as much as you can think of keeping min mind that you still have 3 copies of the original data (two old drives plus the image on the new drive) you can always go back and get more.
Now that data has been rescued somewhat, go ahead and remove the new drive (install it into the external enclosure if you want) and then try to recover the partition on the old drive

 

[cyber-flyer]

Thank you for the suggestions. Yep, I've learned my lesson on using an internal back up drive.
The old motherboard had ACHI enabled as well.
I will proceed with the data recovery. I have run GetDataBack overnight - it sees 6 alternative data structures with the correct overall size. I will check them all today - may be I get lucky.

 

[sushiserv]

I am oddly enough having a similar issue. I know this is crazy late in the game, but this was my work around for this:

I installed RST, and suddenly one of my hard drive disappeared but was still detected in the BIOS.

I uninstalled RST, and the hard drive came back like it never left.

Right now, I am doing a back up of all of the hard drives in my computer. My current set up is Acronis auto-scheduler + a 4 TB NAS I got at Best Buy.

After that, I am going to see popatim 's suggestion regarding RST possibly switching my drive to RAID mode in the BIOS.

Second Edit: Making these edits in case someone comes on this post in the future and is like "What did you see!"

All hard drives backed up to my NAS, and RST reinstalled. There is an Intel Raid 0 volume suddenly present in my Disk Drives. I'm going to see if there is a safe way to remove it w/out deleting the data for the folks who didn't do a data backup, but if I can't, I do at least have my backup.

Last Edit:
Eventually, I had to give up. I downloaded a Linux Live CD iso, and oddly enough, the drive that thinks it is a RAID volume was the only one that mounted in Linux.

I reformatted the drive in Linux (couldn't seem to do it in Windows) initially as NTFS, but then Linux kept saying "Intel RST Raid Member." No.

I formatted it to ext4, and then booted back to Windows, and formatted the drive to NTFS. The drive reads as normal now, and I'm copying the contents of my backup back to it.

Thank you Intel RST. For being a pain. -_-