Rebuilt RAID 5 not showing, needs initializing...

[franklee]

Hello All,

Yesterday, my 3 disk on-board (AMD/VIA) RAID 5 array disappeared. Upon inspection with RAIDXpert, one of the drives had failed (unplugged I think). So I thought I should try rebooting and see if it returned. It did. So upon seeing it back and functioning, I ran two tests with 'Seatools' to check the drive. These returned fine, so I proceeded to rebuild the array.

I left this overnight last night. Checking it this morning, RAIDxpert tells me my array is up and functioning, however, the array is not visible in Windows. In 'Windows Disk Management', it shows as a non initialized drive and requests that I initialize it. So I looked into this a little and the general consensus is that initializing will wipe data from the array.

I am currently running a redundancy check through RAIDxpert and this is about 65% completed.

My question is: Have I, (by rebuilding the array somehow wrongly), already lost my data? If so, is this forever, or are there some methods worth trying to retrieve it?

My setup:
gigabyte GA970A-D3 board
amd 4100 (i think) cpu
2x Samsung 1.5tb HD154UI HDD
1x WDC 2tb WD20EARX HDD

RAID 5 using on-board RAID
Windows 7 64bit SP1

Any info/support/ideas will be appreciated.

Cheers.

[Jar]

Did you replace the failing drive?

[franklee]

No. The failing drive, tested fine once separate to the array. I'm unsure as to why the drive faulted in the first place..

I have run ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery (http://www.reclaime.com/) and that discovered the raid parameters. And I have retrieved some data using ZAR. (http://www.z-a-recovery.com/)

If someone could recommend a free alternative that may be able to recover my data with folder and file-names intact, I'd be extremely grateful.

I consider myself lucky. I have placed an order on a microserver and am looking at a couple of 'on-line' storage options, to ensure this never happens again...


Cheers.

[networks]

Things do not add up. A raid5 can loose 1 drive and still work. If you loose 2 drives its toast unless you can recover the 2nd drive. Normally I image each of the drives and rebuild the raid with r-studio or x-ways neither is free and I am not aware of a "free" tool to rebuild a raid set and recover data. So what really happened ?

[franklee]

Hi,

I'm not sure what really happened. One minute the array was fine, then next 'poof' it disappeared. When I checked raidxpert, it said that 1 of the 1.5tb drives had failed or was missing (I can't remember exactly, I think it said it was unplugged). As said in my initial post, I rebooted, it reappeared, I scanned it with seatools, then rebuilt the array. After that, Windows wanted to initialize it... As for why it didn't just rebuild and appear with data intact.. I have no idea. I believe it may have wiped the data when it was rebuilding, but that is only a guess. I also wonder if something corrupt was written to 2 disks at the same time? Lesson is: Don't trust on-board RAID (probably more so RAID 5).

I have a friend who works in a small IT shop (repairs, builds etc) he said he's got something that will work so I am visiting him later this week. I know the data is there and is accessible as I've recovered a few folders with ZAR, so hopefully he'll be able to save the rest...

Cheers.

[hddguy]

If someone could recommend a free alternative that may be able to recover my data with folder and file-names intact, I'd be extremely grateful.

In your result, you have no file names and folder structure? If so then maybe config from Reclaime could be wrong.

Why does it need to be a "free alternative" ? You may have saved your data with the use of clever software but you do not want to pay for software to show support for the people behind such tools?

[ReclaiMe]

hddguy,

Two things you may want to note,

1. On NTFS, you can get good tree and good file names, and still the RAID parameters can be wrong. This is especially true for RAID 0. With RAID 5, some of the files and folders will be missing. However, the tree structure will still resemble the original very much. This happens because on NTFS file content is decoupled from folder tree. To rebuild a folder tree on NTFS, you only need all the MFT records, in arbitrary order. To get the file content, you need data to be stored in proper order.

2. If he did a rebuild, and the disks were in wrong order for a rebuild, the thing looks hopeless. I'm not even sure if we can use the term "correct parameters" in this situation, because there would be two conflicting sets of parameters, both of which would be correct to a certain extent, but none of which would produce valid data. If the rebuild did commence with the parameters matching these of the original array, the data is still there.

[hddguy]

hddguy,

Two things you may want to note,

1. On NTFS, you can get good tree and good file names, and still the RAID parameters can be wrong.

I am not disputing this. Wrong block size, order, parity distribution, all can still show folder names. Even totally wrong order can give structures using software like r-studio. But will be many missing data, MFT errors, corrupt folder names etc. But for the most part, a correctly built RAID will show good structure. This is why I stated config "could" be wrong.

It has been wrong for me before in some cases.

2. If the rebuild did commence with the parameters matching these of the original array, the data is still there.

I agree, and probably same parameters were used. For this is possible to identify previous data.

I see anywhere between 5 and 15 new RAID cases each week, many are a result of a rebuild, while I cannot recover some of these after rebuild most are recovered fine, or with minimum problems.