Help! Raid array went down after I changed a cable

[Ross1]

I have a srcsatawb, 4 2TB drives in raid 5. Shut my computer down and moved a couple of drives around for better airflow, and ended up changing the cable on 2 of the drives. Now when I switch the thing on the array has failed, the 2 drives I left untouched are still online, but the other two are 'unconfigured'. So then I tried going through every other cable on the controller (8 - the two i left untouched = 6) on one of the hard drives, but it says its unconfigured on every single one.

So, why would my drives suddenly become unconfigured when switching port on the controller? Secondly, why would it not go back online once it was attached to its original port?

Oh yeah, i switched the machine off before each of those changes. Not only that, but once the controller posts a failure, it starts making the loudest, high pitched beep ive heard from a pc.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to get those two drives back online again? If not, and the array is lost for good, im guessing all that data is completely gone, and theres no way to get it back, right?

 

[Ross1]

okay, i fixed the problem by going into the raid bios and selecting the unconfigured drives and then replacing the missing drive. I couldnt do this in intels webraid thing or megaraid storage manager. Never used the raid bios before because the keyboard didnt work and hadnt enabled usb mouse support in the mobo bios >_>

Lesson learned: I will now always label my hard drives.

Also found out i couldnt expand my raid 5 array with megaraid or intels webraid (which is seeminly a rebranded megaraid, much like the srcsatawb is a rebranded LSI MegaRAID SAS 8708ELP. However, i could do it via the raid bios, and thankfully you dont have to stay in the bios while it rebuilds, i can watch it with megaraid....

that 26% has taken 12 hours, so going to be a full 2 days in total to complete.