RAID array playing up, have I lost everything?

TrojanWhore

TrojanWhore

TrojanWhore

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basically, I have been having problems with my 2 samsung f3 1TB drives, which i believe may have had it.
they were in raid 0, which I migrated smoothly to my new p67 motherboard, all was going well until the announcement of the sata2 issues with the chipset.
After trying to connect my RAID drives to the SATA3 (6Gbps) ports, my drives were clicking, and wouldnt boot.
I thought at this point they were dead and installed windows to a spare partition to tide me over. no problems here apart from the fact I didnt have my windows key anywhere. I am hoping some of the data on the disks is still ok, as I might be able to retreive my key.

after more reading, it seems that the firmware on my drives has issues with SATA3, and requires flashing to fix.

so yesterday, I try again to boot from the array, but this time back on the 3Gbps ports, and the matrix raid manager shows me that there is an error on one of the discs, which is almost identical to this screenshot
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despite this at one point it tried to boot, and got to midway through the windows loading logo before a BSOD with 'unmountable volume' or something to that effect.

all I really need to know is, is there any way to connect the drive(s) so that I can see any files on it (them)? (specifically I plan to boot to another OS which I can see the drives from and hopefully recover my windows key)
 
Just on the off chance, what happens if you swap the 2 disk's sata ports over. I'm just wondering if you put them the wrong way round, and the raid controller has noticed.
 
TrojanWhore said:
hmmm, could there be a 'wrong' way round? I thought due to the way RAID works that this shouldn't cause any issues. will try it anyway, thanks for the input!
Click to expand...

I've managed it before, and IIRC that was the symptom I was seeing.

You really must have an effective backup solution if you are going to use RAID0 though. 2 TB is a lot of data to loose.
 
yeah I am aware of the importance of backing up any files I can't afford to lose.
Most of my important stuff is either not important any more, or I do have a back up of it (or both!), however, I thought my windows key was in an email saved in my inbox, but it turns out that the email contains a link to how to get my key, which I can no longer log into as I'm not a student any more (MSDNAA thing).
Had I known of the existence of software such as 'Produkey' before I got my sandy bridge (or even betweent then and last week) then it wouldn't be a problem, as I would have ran that on my old windows install, but I didn't know about it, so I just wrote down the product ID code

edit: sounded a bit more irate than I meant it to, sorry!
 
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You may be able to recover your data by deleting the array, and then recreating it with the same parameters. It is always a bit risky, but sometimes works. You can then try to run data recovery software on it.

It is very rare that you actually lose your data, it just becomes too difficult or expensive to retrieve it.

I hope that his helps
 
Don't you have an old copy of xp somewhere that you can chuck on an old drive? Once installed, you might be able to see the array in Windows. Also, when installing windows, try skipping the serial number part by clicking 'next' without entering a number. Sometimes works.

In future, start fresh with a Raid 0+1 array. Intel matrix storage manager lets you do that. Yes, you lose half the capacity of the 2 drives combined, but your important data is being mirrored real time to the other drive so you don't lose anything.
 
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