RAID 5 Failed?

Conanius · 19 Sep 2010 at 12:13

Hi All,

I've got a homebuilt PC which I think might be on the blink.

Shut it down the other day, working absolutely fine.

Restarted it today, and the D: (3x500GB Samsung drives in RAID 5 through an onboard controller on my mobo) doesn't appear anymore. Instead, a D and E drive appear (Saying they aren't formatted) and disc management in Windows can only see 2 of the 3 drives.

Rebooting the machine, the RAID bios displays that it can see all 3 drives (About to reboot and go into said bios to see if it says any health warnings or somesuch.

Any ideas where I should start here chaps?

Edit - Just checked the RAID BIOS. it shows the array status as healthy, and all drives displayed and look fine.

Looking in device manager there doesnt appear to be any conflicts or issues... any ideas ?

Conanius · 19 Sep 2010 at 12:43

kg648 · 19 Sep 2010 at 19:59

Intel faketrix shrug, should really of used the windows built-in raid features.

Long shot but this always use to work for me, unplug all the disks and boot to bios and then turn machine off and plug them all back in again.

Again i would highly not recommend using Intel Matrix array functions.

Toughnoodle · 20 Sep 2010 at 10:57

Not sure if this will work, it did for me in a different scenario. I switched from RAID mode to IDE mode to test some HDs with a drive manufacturers fitness test. When I switched it back to RAID it came back with my RAID5 array as non-RAID disks. I ran through the steps below and it saved my bacon (and around 1TB of business data).

*I am not responsible for any data loss blablabla, I'm just giving you a possible sollution; from my experience it tends to work*
1) Enter the Ctrl-I configuration utility. Write your raid level, array size, stripe size and everything else that can be configured on a piece of paper, you'll need this info later.
2) Delete the Raid-array. Yup, that's right, just throw it away.
3) Reboot and create a new array just like your old one. If you do not use the full disk for your array, make the array slightly (0.5GB or so) larger than the old one, so you're sure the old one fits on the new one.
4) Reboot. Don't enter the drive system manger panel in windows. Download and install testdisk. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
5) Start testdisk. The program ask you whether or not it should create a log file. It doesn't matter for all I know, so choose whatever you like. Select your brand new raid array. Select 'Intel partition' if you have a regular
Windows partition. Next choose 'Analyse', then 'Quick search'. If your old array doesn't show up, try 'Deeper search'. Now your partition should show. Select the old partition and press Enter, then 'Write'. Testdisk now
writes the old partition table on your new array.
6) Close the program, reboot and everything should be fine.

Oh, and as a quicker fix, have you tried running it without the HD in port 5? Maybe it has a conflicting RAID config.