Raid 10 (0+1) recovery problems

[sonar]

Hello community!

I have a very serious problem with my RAID and hope someone here can help.

At first my specs:

I am running Windows 7 64bit on a PC with the ASUS P7P55D Mainboard and five 1TB hard drives. Four of them were striped and mirrored in one RAID 10. The remaining drive was used as the system disc.
This morning an error popped up while I was booting, stating that one of the drives went offline. I restarted in order to have a look at the RAID-BIOS and from then on Windows didn't boot anymore.
It just couldn't find the system disc and three of the four RAID discs were offline.

So I checked all the cables and eventually exchanged the system disc and reinstalled windows. Now I can boot the system but still can't access the RAID.

When I disconnect the drives 3 and 4 the remaining two are recognized as functioning RAID member discs. I thought I might be able to restore one of the two RAID-0s this way but that didn't work because in Windows it's shown as one partition and not as several independent drives.

There is still another option. Deleting the RAID and setting it up again and then run a recovery. But that seems a bit too risky to me because all my work stuff is on that friggin thing.

Any advice which software to use or other hints about what might possibly work?

Any help is appreciated, I'm kinda lost here.

Thanks!

[HDD Spaz]

You should clone all 4 disks before you do anything.

Connect all disks then identify which disks are the RAID 0. Use software such as Winhex. You can slo use winhex to rebuild the RAID manually, then extract the data to another hard drive.

You need to idenify disk order, starting sector (usually 0) and block size.

[dobrevjetser]

By any chance these disks are Seagate 7200.11 series ? Then it could be the firmware problem.

Dobre

[sonar]

No they are not. But last night I managed to fix the problem

If somebody happens to have the same problem, here is what I did:

As described above I replaced the system hard drive with a new one and reinstalled Windows because it didn't boot at all.

By unplugging all the raid discs and reconnecting them I finally found out that one drive seemed to be the cause of all problems. So I went to the store, got a new one and replaced it. Now the system wouldn't boot anymore again. So I disconnected the new drive and booted with three of the four raid drives.

When Windows was up I connected the last drive and set it as replacement in the Intel Raid software thing.

So the raid mounted and I backed up all data over night onto an external disc.

I still had to reinstall Windows because somehow my system disc wasn't recognized as bootable anymore but now it works smoothly again.

Thanks for your help!

[HDD Spaz]

seems like you didnt need our help afterall.

[lcoughey]

The problem with this scenario is when it doesn't work. It is so frustrating trying to recover from a failed RAID array after the client has shuffled drives in and out and attempted to rebuild multiple times. To help, we provide a low cost service to mirror each drive in a RAID (assuming that they are healthy) and set them aside while the client takes the originals back to play. If they succeed with their efforts, they have only paid us a couple hundred dollars for the peace of mind. If they fail, we can move forward and recover from the clones without having to deal with any extra problems.