RAID disaster, need help?!!!!!

[runnin17]

I have a Perc 5i running RAID5 with 4 Hitachi 1TB HD's.

I was doing a clean install of Windows 7 and the install hung in the middle of setup. So I restarted the computer and the setup seemed to finish just fine. However, now windows could not read my RAID array. WTF!!!!!!

Moved the card and drives to another computer with windows 7 on it and still no luck. Flash the card to the latest LSI firmware, still no luck.

Windows will see the disk as "unallocated space" in disk manager and EASEUS Partition Manager sees the disk as all "GPT disk". Acronis can't clone the disk b/c it reads it as all blank. It does not seem like any of the drives have failed, but I don't know what to do.

I don't really know if rebuilding the array will delete my data or not. I am running EASEUS DataRecovery Wizard right now and it seems like it is reading all the files, but I am not sure if it will be able to recover them.

I am mainly pissed because I have a lot of music backup up on the drive and a lot of recorded TV shows (it is a 2.72TB array and it was almost full)!!!

Please HELP??????!!!!!!!

 

[spectrumbx]

Recover as much data as you can.

Don't try to rebuild it or do anything else before then.

 

[brandinb]

My advice would be to not make any decisions to hasty. I think you really should not have flashed the controller firmware. I would guess by your description you need to "copy raid config" from the drives to the controller firmware. Then the controller should understand the array. If it is not letting you do this then you will need to do a data recovery which while pretty simple can be intimidating if you have never done it. At this point you want to avoid writing anything to the array. This is how I reccomend going about the recovery. I would plug the raid disks into the onboard sata controller. This will allow the system to see them as seperate disks. I would then install windows xp on a seperate drive on the system so you have a clean system running xp and the bare drives that will show up as not initialized.
Then you need two programs Raid Reconstructor and Captain Nemo. You will use Raid reconstructor to rebuild the raid virtually through software. This will just translate the data on the drives to allow you to read the data with Captain nemo. You will save the file (a few kb) to your disk and open it with Captain nemo and the software will translate the raid array in real time and allow you to view the full file system. You will then copy the files off to another target like a 2tb usb drive or a network location such as another server or pc. After you are done recovering all your files this way test them for corruption and your done. Then you can reinstall your raid card and reconfigure the array and copy the files back.

I have used this method many times and recovered many customers raid arrays either software or hardware raid it has never failed me. This is the same type of job data recovery companies would do if you sent your drives into them for big bucks aswell.

Good luck and do not write one bit of data to the drives untill you have recovered everything.

 

[runnin17]

Well, unfortunately I tried to setup the system by plugging them into my mobo's SATA connections and running recovery software, but it did not work.

For some reason plugging them into the system caused a couple of drives to act funny. Not really sure what happened. Thankfully all of the data was just TV shows and backed up moves. Nothing really important. I guess next time I ever try to install a clean OS I will always unplug my raid card from the system completely.

 

[sub.mesa]

Just make sure to distinguish RAID from backup - having a RAID5 without backup is not that much safer than a RAID0 without a backup - in my humble opinion. Most RAID data is lost not by physical disk failure but failures of the RAID-level itself.