Help Data Lost with Raid 5 rebuild

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unknown9995

n00b
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Dec 23, 2009
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Hi
Recently I have rebuilded by Nvidia raid 5.
I had four 500 gig drives in my raid 5.
Originally i had about 222 gig of free space out of 1.36 tb.
I was messing around and switching out cables and different sata ports and caused one of the drive to drop out of the raid.

So I started to rebuild the that drive. Well while it was rebuilding i turned the computer off the normal way by going to shut down. The next day it was stuck on 38 percent and would't move.

I mess around with a lot of stuff and was finally able to get it to keep on rebuild again by taking the entire raid controller offline and switch sata ports the raid uses.

When it finally rebuilded I have now 236 gig of free space left on my drive. My question is where did the extra free space came from? did I lost some data? I went and checked through the number of files I have on my raid and I could not find any missing files.

I did not do a resync all I did was a simple rebuild.

Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this?
During the rebuild processes chkdsk was automatically performed on the raid drive when I started the computer and also I dont have any system restore points set up on this drive that could be taking up any space.

Thanks
 
That is kinda disturbing.
Did you have a swap file or any other temporary files on that volume?

Also, you should avoid writing to the volume until you attempt to run data recovery like an undelete program. These types of programs can recover not only deleted files but orphaned files too. If you write to the drive it could write over whatever was there. So run the undelete program from a different volume.
 
I have not rewritten anything to the drive besides the rebuild.
I have used a file restoration program on the drive it self and was not able to find anything that was lost.
 
when u say swap file what do u mean by that?
I do not have any page file or system restore file on that drive.
 
yeah, a page file is a type of swap file. Anything that gets taken out of memory and temporarily held on the Hard Drive.
 
Yeah I dont have page files on my computer period
I believe they slow down ur machine so i pump it up with more ram and take off the page file all together.
 
I really need to find out why the data lost occured as I dont want to back up the data to the drive from 300 dvds
cause that would take forever
 
Well if you can't find anything missing, and none of your files were corrupted then you have a few explanations:
1) you've lost something that is unimportant enough that you don't notice it's gone
2) your estimate on the free space before this happened is wrong
3) there were hidden files of some king that are now gone, possibly from the recycle bin or something else that hogs space in the background.
 
i have mostly rmvb files on it so its not a program i can test and see if it still works.
and as for the 2nd part
my estimate of the free space is not wrong
i have the log from a chkdsk last night and then this morning ( after the rebuild)
and then number of available free space between the 2 log was different.

I dont think there is any files in the recycle bin as I never put files to the recycle bin
i just do shift delete all the time.

This is what is so troubling me as I dont know where can the free space come from.
Anyone familar with raid know if rebuilding or resyncing a raid can cause the raid to become tighter and more compact in space and thus would explain the free space?
 
Actually, all windows operating systems need a swap file. Even if you had 16GB of memory, it wouldn't matter. Many programs are hard coded to use the system pagefile, all M$ programs for example. If you had an abnormal shutdown I can see how many programs would lose data because they were programed to use the pagefile and you have disabled it. The same would be true if you ran your pagefile on a RAMDisk. If the computer is shutdown improperly it will lose everything that was open at the time.
 
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