Marvell RAID showing no virtual disks - data lost?

[Apple Of Sodom]

I have a Gigabyte mobo (GA-Z77X-UD5H) and have two hard drives for storage on a RAID-1. Today they stopped responding. Upon reboot Windows recognized them as two separate drives. When I enter my RAID controller it tells me there are no virtual disks then shows my two hard drives ready to be mounted as virtual disks. I was relying on RAID-1 for primary backup and obviously didn't take into account that the RAID controller could go bad and screw me. I am currently running TestDisk. Any other thoughts? Is there a way for me to remount these drives as a virtual disk in the Marvell RAID controller and copy the data off?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, you learned the lesson the hard way - RAID is NOT backup.

 

[JohnG86]

RAID1 is a mirror so both drives are identical and easily accessible individually. Each disk seen as a standalone should be able to have all files recovered from it as long as the hard drive is good. I have seen that data cant easily be seen when plugged in standalone if one of the drives is going bad and the bad bits of data got mirrored to the other drive causing a corrupt partition table. Data recovery software should have no issues reading all of your data off of one of the hard drives and copy them to another hard drive.

 

[Cerb]

If they're in RAID 1, why not just move one to a different port w/ no RAID?

Then, run chkdsk, make sure your stuff is OK, and then heed the many warnings that RAID is not backup .

 

[_Rick_]

In the future use Windows' software RAID 1, that way you can always access the volumes independently, and there is less chance of some controller bug messing with your data.

You might want to try using a Linux disk, at times dm-raid can emulate the way these controllers work. With RAID 1 you should be able to recover, by just skipping across the weird RAID header that the controller used.