Help Please. Raid 5 on Sabertooth 990FX

[Roudy]

If anyone could tell me or give me direction I would greatly appreciate it. I have an Asus Sabertooth 990FX running Windows 7 64-bit. I know Raid 5 isn't a backup solution however it just happened. Everything was working fine until a reboot yesterday. I didn't have any updates happen, I just decided to reboot. I have (3) 2TB Western Digital drives configured in a Raid 5 array which is my storage and it has everything on it. After a reboot it shows the one disk which is the array as needing to be initialized. It's still showing the array as almost 4TB size so that part is correct. I'm wondering if I can initialize or will it erase all my data. If initializing isn't viable then how can I retrieve the data. In the BIOS of the motherboard it's showing the array correct with 3 drives and they are reporting as being good and mapped correctly. I purchased another drive so as soon as I get it back up I'm removing the Raid 5 and just using the (2) 2TB drives and an additional 2 drives to do backups on.

Any thoughts?

CPU: AMD-8150
Memory: 24GB Corsair Vengeance
OS: Windows 7 64-bit on 120GB SSD
Storage (3) Western Digital 2TB drives

 

[nehalem256]

If you have a 3 disk RAID5 and are only missing 1 disk from the array then you should still have all of the data on the remaining 2 disks.

Is Windows still able to see what should be a 4TB Virtual Disk?

 

[Roudy]

That's the issue is windows. Windows shows that there is 3725GB available on the unallocated disk and is telling me that it needs to initialize either with MBR or GPT. With 3725GB showing that tells me that 2/3 of the storage is available which is correct with a total of (3) 3TB hard drives used. Hope this answered it.

 

[Roudy]

Has anyone else had this happen. after rebooting it ask to initialize the raid 5 array. all drives show good status and the array still exist in windows 7 64-bit. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Roudy

 

[Nothinman]

Yes, if you initialize the drive it will effectively wipe it and you'll need to use data recovery tools to get your data back.

Windows is pretty picky about which filesystems it will mount, I would boot a Linux Live CD/USB and see if you can access the filesystem from there. Chances are it will mount fine and you'll be able to see everything. The difficult part will be making it usable in Windows again.