Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
November 2nd, 2010, 1:41
Hi Forum,
Somewhat long time lurker, first time poster. I'm an IT pro but my no means a data recovery or HDD guru, hence seeking help here. I have a system here with a gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard, with onboard intel ICH10 raid controller. When I updated the bios, it auto updated the onboard raid controller and the raid array gave up the ghost. The array was RAID5, 3 drives, now it detects the array as failed, with only 1 drive, and 2 "spare" drives. A bit of digging seems to indicate the problem. Either the original firmware had a bug causing it to misread the drives serial numbers, or the upgrade has somehow mangled the data.
The array believes its missing drives with serial numbers D-WCAYY1234567 and D-WMAZA1234567 (serials missing leading W), and the "spare drives" its detecting are WD-WCAYY1234567 & WD-WCAYY1234567.
My understanding is the array control information is stored on the drives themselves. Would I be correct in assuming that it should be relatively easy to restore the array by editing it to be looking for the correct serial numbers? If so could anyone offer me some suggestions on where and in what format I would find the array control information, and a suitable tool to edit it (Winhex??).
Thanks in advance for your help.