Recovering a 3 disk RAID-5 w/Intel controller... plz help!

[n1ce_hat]

Ah having a bit of a problem here.

MOBO - Asus P6T WS PRO

One drive of a 3-drive RAID-5 array has failed.

Upon booting, in the RAID's BIOS said there was one disk that one disk was offline and another was at error. It asked me if I want to fix it, I hit yes, asked me again, I hit yes again. I assume it 'fixed' one of the drives' error state but the other it couldn't find.

When the system is booting with these drives installed, the BIOS hangs at the failed drive.

^ This is the BIOS with the 3 original HDDs installed.

There are no options to do anything, really.

So I have another 1.5 TB, brand new. So I took out the failed drive, put this new one in it's place, and booted to the RAID's BIOS, and it looks exactly like the above screenshot except instead of 'offline member' it says 'non-RAID drive'.

So there are no options here to do anything.

I had the idea to install Win7 on another HDD, I took a 250GB and got that ready, and installed drivers + Intel Matrix Storage manager.

I just installed everything, is there anything I can do at this point?

Any help will be greatly appreciated! 4.5 TB of data on the line!

Thx!!!

 

[kac77]

This looks like it's saying the raid collection failed. It should say degraded with only one drive out.

 

[houkouonchi]

Looks to me like it was a 4 disk raid5 array and two of the disks failed otherwise those arrays would not be in the fail state.

 

[Old Hippie]

Looks to me like it was a 4 disk raid5 array and two of the disks failed otherwise those arrays would not be in the fail state.

How do you figure it was a 4 disk array when he says there were 3?

The port number has nothing to do with the nember of drives connected.

So I have another 1.5 TB, brand new. So I took out the failed drive, put this new one in it's place, and booted to the RAID's BIOS, and it looks exactly like the above screenshot except instead of 'offline member' it says 'non-RAID drive'.

So there are no options here to do anything.

The option was "#1 - Create RAID volume" after you installed a new drive.

I use RAID0 and am no pro with RAID5 but I would have started my search here.

And just in case you didn't know....RAID is NOT a back-up.

 

[houkouonchi]

How do you figure it was a 4 disk array when he says there were 3?

The port number has nothing to do with the nember of drives connected.

Because the array would not be in a failed state with 2/3 member disks online. Also the fact that he said 4.5 TB of data which would equate to a 4 disk array.

 

[Old Hippie]

Because the array would not be in a failed state with 2/3 member disks online.

Yes it would. Please educate yourself......
In addition, if two (2) or more drives fail or become corrupted at the same time, all data on the volume would be inaccessible to the user.

That's called failed.

Also the fact that he said 4.5 TB of data which would equate to a 4 disk array.

I just assumed he exaggerated because even with another 1.5TB drive he couldn't put 4.5 TB + redudant data on there, but if you claim he can't count drives that's up to you.

 

[omniscence]

I don't completely understand what the original state was. You said that one disk was offline and another disk showed an error? That would be the explanation for the RAID to be offline. If that is really what happened you cannot recover with just BIOS and the Intel tool I think.

 

[bexamous]

Looks to me like it was a 4 disk raid5 array and two of the disks failed otherwise those arrays would not be in the fail state.

In screenshot it says boot & storage arrays are 300GB + 2500GB = 2800GB. 3 1.5TB drives in raid5 would make sense. If it had been 4 drives it would be around 4300Gb for storage.



Anyways if those two drives are actually good, even if you cannot get array working Intel Storage Matrix you can most likley get most if not all files off using 3rd party recovery software. Not really complex stuff... just google a bit, no idea whats actually good.. eg http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/Default.aspx I'm guessing there are alot of 3rd party software that'll give u free demo to show you files you can recover, and then charge you if you want to actually get them off.