Solved Raid 5 became unallocated.

Turned on computer and found that drive D: was missing again. As before, it was unallocated. Setting it as a simple drive with letter D: has Windows 7/ 64 Professional asking to format the drive. This time nothing was plugged into the USB ports.

A hardware RAID5 is usually comprised of 3 or more hard disks......lets see the Disk management screen please.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html

screen capture

here is the disk managment

The other blank disks is from the simm card reader.

d: is a three 2 tb hard drive Raid 5

D: is a single physical disk....there is no way it could have been a RAID5. How did you originally build the RAID?

If it matters I noticed the (D) is also RAW not NTSF.

hmmm.....whether RAID or LAID (just for rhyme), I am of the opinion that either Partition Recovery Wizard or TestDisk should be able to write the lost/corrupted Partition Table if that is what has turned it RAW. I would however like to take other experts' opinion - like Golden and Laybackbear as we proceed and come to that stage.

And so let us get started. Download install and run MiniTools Partition Wizard Free Edition 9.0 30.49 MB Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online

Post a screenshot showing ypur RAID drive. ( Please remove all other USB storage devices, We don't want to be confused.)

Sample:



Next click on Partition Recovery Wizard on the left Pane > Next > Select your RAID disk > Next > Full Disk > Next > Quick Scan > Next. Allow Quick Scan to complete and post the resulting screen showing the partitions at the end. Hilight the main partition/volume and double click on the highlighted partition. Does it show all your files? Yes/No



Once you have snapped it, click on Cancel and close the Partition Wizard. This is the stage where I will require a second opinion whether we should proceed further since it is a RAID drive. ( We can rerun Partition Recovery Wizard again if necessary. Please do not jump the instructions and do things on your own.) Please do not do anything in haste and wait for further instructions after consultation.

Jumanji, I think we should proceed with recovery of the RAW volume - it is not possible that this disk was ever in a RAID5.

It has been a Raid 5 for four years.

A RAID5 is comprised of a minimum of 3 hard disks....your D: is a single hard disk. How could it have been a RAID5?

Asus motherboard Raid 5 with three 2 TB drives. Why it shows as one drive is a good question. When it is looked at with other software it shows as a 2+1 Raid 5.

What software? Please provide a screen capture image showing this Asus setup.

Actually, prompted by Steve, I've had a look at my system, and my 2 x disk RAID0 shows as a single physical disk in Disk Management....so I think I am incorrect about your RAID5 setup.

I thought that since the volume shows as RAW, we should see the 3 disks shows as separate entities in Disk Management, but apparently not.

Please follow jumanji's advise to see whether its possible to recover the data.

After seeing post #13 yesterday night (ET) I composed this post but put it in the backburner and decided to wait for OP's response to that post.

"@Golden, I don't know much about RAID 3 but from what little I read about RAID 3 when I entered this thread, it does require minimum three drives out of which one is for parity and the other two only are for data and I have been presuming that these two data drives would show up as one drive just like in RAID 0. So I was not surprised when the OP's RAID drive - two 2TB drives - showing as a single 3725.16 GB drive ( 2X2TB). The Parity drive may not show up in Windows Disk management or so I have assumed. Should the two data drives show up as individual drives?

(On my Desktop in India which uses Gigabyte motherboard software RAID which I had configured as RAID 0 the two 250GB drives show up as one single drive of 500GB.Of course I had to inject Gigabyte Raid driver during the Windows installation process to recognize it as a single drive. In the early days when I was using Paragon Recovery Disk to image that system drive I had to, during the booting process, inject the Gigabyte raid drivers for it to show the raid drive as one single drive. If I do not, then those two will show up as individual drives and I cannot image the drive. Some other partitioning software when run from a bootable disk also will show the RAID drive as two single drives and there was no provision to inject the raid driver and obviously I could not use those for manipulating the five partitions in my raid drive, one of which is the system partition.) "

Now that the issue is resolved , and clarity has been achieved thanks to Steve's ( I presume essenbe) prompt to Golden I would add this.

I normally do not use my system raid drive for my experiments on HDD but on the one occasion I did, something went wrong and my system became unbootable. I panicked because it was a raid drive and I was unsure whether the normal restoration process we use for single non-raid disks would work to restore the lost MBR. Anyway I had to restore it to get my system back and so I ran TestDisk for DOS which I had ready on a pendrive and wrote the MBR using it and my system came back alive.

From this episode I did learn, that on a raid configuration whether 2,3 or 10 drives showing as a single drive - which it should unless the raid is broken - we can use the same restore techniques that we use on single drives. And that is why I started off my intrusion in this thread with the statement " hmmm.....whether RAID or LAID (just for rhyme), I am of the opinion that either Partition Recovery Wizard or TestDisk should be able to write the lost/corrupted Partition Table if that is what has turned it RAW."

And yes, the OP should go ahead with Partition Recovery using Partititon Wizard as ordained in that post #8 but stop with posting the screenshot of the partitions shown. Only after examination by all other experts involved in this thread - including essenbe ,who I am sure is watching this thread - agree to go ahead to write the partition table - if found. I am keeping my fingers crossed at the moment. Nothing is certain till we get those screenshots asked for in post#8.

Me as a person that knows less than nothing about Raid. I'm learning by following this thread.
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I do have a question tho.

@dloydc

Because as we are finding out; Raid can be very tricky thing to do and keep working as it should, why are you using Raid and do you really need to use Raid?
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Is their possibly a better method that can be used to suite dloydc needs and desires without using Raid??

RAID isn't tricky to keep going....that's just a myth, in part propagated on these forums.

The most important thing now is for the OP to follow jumanji's advice in an attempt to get data recovered.

No it doesn't show anything.

In answer to post #13. That is done in bios not windows. As any other raid set up is done using the motherboard hardware. As for why I was using a raid, so that this would not happen. Well, losing a hard drive in a raid 5 should be recoverable by replacing the bad hard drive without losing data. All three of the drives checked out fine using different hard drive tests. I have recovered the files. But, they are just files in folders of like files. Not the folders that they were in. At 2.6 tb, that is a lot of files to sort into the folders that they should be in. And, forget about the programs that were on the drives. Recovery software is only good for data.

Here is a software showing D: as a Raid 5