Need RAID help please!

[Doggiedog]

I just had a blackout and my bios was completely reset. Also, the new Vista 64 patch was ready to be installed on my system but I didn't restart the PC yet.

When I was finally able to get the computer to restart, the patch installed. Afterwards, my RAID drive was empty. Is my data gone? I can see the drive but its not initialized and I haven't formatted it yet. Is there anyway I can restore it? I could never back it up because it is 3TB while the other drives I have are about 2TB in total size.

TIA

 

[Doggiedog]

Crap...

I just found I lost another drive, a regular SATA one this time as well. That one has all of its data missing.

 

[Old Hippie]

You had a blackout while waiting for a patch to be installed....Wow kinda like a perfect storm.

Big time bummer!

It's hard to believe the data is gone and I wouldn't reformat untill I tried something like GetDataBack's recovery software.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

yeah, don't reformat....take a step back...clear you head...walk around the block...

Now, what happened? Your BIOS got reset...ok...first fix the bois. Make sure that it's working properly and it's set for RAID not AHCI or something. If it went back to default status, you need to reset everything to the way it was. Personally, I would do a full reset on the bios at the board level (jumpers) and then start again with setting it up for your RAID. I would remove any non critical path items from the board, USB etc. Take out all but one stick of memory. The idea is to take this down to the simplest configuration first.

Take another deep breath...step away...walk around...come back and double check your setting and the rig setup...cables everything. Reconnect drive cables or check that they are secure...

Ok...now boot...

Go into the RAID settings...make sure that they are setup correctly. You didn't say what Chipset or even if you were using chipset raid, but I'm guessing Intel. Go into the intel setup at the BIOS level and see that your RAID sets are still listed as valid and your drives are shown there as good. It should show a valid RAID config. This information is stored on the drive itself in a few places, so it's unlikely that it would be corrupted. If you formatted the drive and did a low-level wipe, it would be gone, but I'm guessing that you didn't do that and the power spike wouldn't do that.

Try to boot. You didn't say if this is the boot volume, but with that size, I'm guessing that it isn't a boot volume.

you should boot up.

go into you control panel and check the disk partitions. If you are showing multiple disks and not a single raid volume...then you have an issue. It's like a chipset issue...that's my guess. Don't mess with the drives like formatting them.

If you show one big drive, then RAID is working and now we need to check the file system.

The fact that you are saying one of your drives has no data on it tells me that you are seeing more than one volume, which means RAID isn't working...that's chipset.

What RAID level?
What Chipset?
How many drives?
Is this the Boot volume?
What OS?

please, don't rush anything...I see that you are a lifer and probably know all of the above, but I can't tell you how many times I've gotten frustrated and done something horribly wrong in the heat of passion.

keep us posted.

 

[Doggiedog]

Thanks for the help and the encouragement!

So this morning before going to work I reset the bios so that everything booted normally and RAID was working.

I found my missing SATA drive. The OS changed the drive letter to D instead of E so that problem is fixed.

I can see the RAID array. The drive letter is correct and the partition is healthy and primary but the file system says RAW and whenever I click on it, the OS asks me if I want to format it. So beyond that, I don't know what else to do.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

That does not sound good. I still have questions about the OS type, RAID chipset, raid level, file system type etc.

my first thoughts are:

1) your RAID stripe got out of sync or something and it's not reporting the drives correctly...so it's reading the data stripes in a weird order or something like that. I'm not sure what chipset you have but this is possible i guess. double check all of your settings one last time in the RAID BIOS.

2) Your file system got hosed and the OS can't read the fs header. I've seen this before...long ago with XP. the OS just couldn't find the partition record or something like that.

in case of 1) you are in rough shape. I'm not sure how to recover if you RAID chipset can't see your RAID drives correctly. I might take the drives out and try putting them in another mobo with the same chipset to make sure that it's not a chipset level issue. You might even be able to put the drives into a different mobo with a newer version of the chipset...but this is problematic. but it might work. This would tell if you're chipset is the issue.

In case of 2, i would try some low lever partition recover tools. norton used to have some stuff for this, and i'm sure partition magic or something like that will have a recovery tool. That should be able to search for a lost partition. That's how i recovered in the past. but again, be careful...if your drives are not being read properly, then you might end up with holes in the data you recover.

I'd try partition recovery first.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You could always try RAID2RAID to recover your data. Google it.

 

[Doggiedog]

Let's see.

I've got a RAID 0 setup on 2x1.5TB Seagate HDDs. Vista 64 with the latest drivers. NTFS. I'm not sure what chipset it is. I can see that it says Intel Storage Matrix. My mobo is an Asus P5K Deluxe.

I just tried RAID2RAID and it says the disk is damaged and that it cannot open it.

When I go into the RAID menu in the bios, the array is there but grayed out. All I can do is delete it.

Thanks for all the help everyone. I will continue to look on the Internet to see what I can do. Hopefully, there's a solution to this.

 

[Emulex]

CERC with BBWC would probably have prevented this situation.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I would look up Intel storage controller on the net. There is a lot of information out there about recovery. If all of your drives show up as "normal" then you have something strange going on...

Sadly, your luck is rubbing off on me. I started looking into this and Boom...I have 2 unrecoverable read errors on 2 differnt drives in my 4 drive RAID0 set. I'm backing them up now...I have a recent backup, so I just need to get the incremental since the last full backup. I'm hopeful that most of my data is there.

I've been wanting to move to WIndows 7 for a while, so this is just the excure I needed.

Hope things work out for you.

 

[Emulex]

intel matrix raid causes far more suffering than good.

they should just ban it except for raid-sata drives (TLER,CER).

the whole of intel matrix raid probably does more for dedicated raid controller sales than anything else lol.

 

[Doggiedog]

I figured out what happened.

When the bios reset, my settings were changed from RAID to IDE. The RAID array was there but the drives both became individual drives. One RAID drive was overwritten because its drive letter corresponded with another hard drive.

So I basically lost my RAID setup.

 

[Old Hippie]

One RAID drive was overwritten because its drive letter corresponded with another hard drive.

Did you do something to make that happen?