RAID5 Array died - please help!

[SailingNut]

I have a RAID5 array in my machine that has the OS and all of my data on it. This morning all of my programs were not responding (I leave my PC on all the time) and I noticed there was no disk activity.

I powered the machine down by a quick press of the power button to have Windows shut down gracefully. When I booted up I saw that there was an error on one of the disks in the volume. I then rebooted and a different disk then showed an error but the first one no longer showed it. I rebooted a couple more times and the same disk was showing the error so I selected to rebuild the volume.

Now when I boot (after the BIOS screen and the Intel RAID screen) I get the error "BOOTMGR image is corrupt. The system cannot boot"

Any and all help is appreciated! (And yes, I do plan on moving away from the RAID setup. Just want to recover some stuff. Most critical stuff is backed up in one way or another, just not as easy as pulling from the disk.)

 

[Outlander]

What drives are you using? SSD, spinners, brand, SATA level?...

 

[SailingNut]

I am using WD spinners. Specifically WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0 GB/s

 

[TokiHacker]

I doubt he is using ssd. He's probably using spinners.

 

[DeaconFrost]

You may have a difficult time getting anything restored/repaired, due to the complexity of RAID5's parity. This is the reason why you don't see RAID5 on desktop computers, and why it is used in server environments, instead.

I doubt anything has come loose, but it can't hurt to check cables. It seems odd that it would complain about different disks, unless you did have multiple fail, or the controller itself is going bad.

 

[SailingNut]

The drive is now showing in the Intel BIOS utility as a member of the RAID volume with no errors and the volume is in a rebuild status. However I can't boot to Windows because of the corruption of the boot loader.

As I think of this I think I am screwed.

I did see in another forum that there is an tool that will let you recover data from a corrupt RAID volume. I think I will try it out after I get a new boot drive. (Going to go to a single 256GB SSD for boot and then will use the other drives for backup space.)

 

[DeaconFrost]

You may need the RAID drivers handy, but what about trying to repair the bootloader as normal? If you load the drivers from a flash drive during the process, the array should be visible.

 

[SailingNut]

Well I happened to have a Win boot able USB stick available so I started it up to see if I could repair the boot manager. When I opened the file explorer I use with the stick, I could not see any files. However, I noticed a lot of HDD activity with the LED. So I think it MIGHT be doing a rebuild. I'm leaving it running and keeping my fingers crossed!

 

[SailingNut]

So the Intel RAID bios says that the array is healthy but I still get the BOOTMGR corrupt error when booting.

I previously booted from a WinPE USB stick but the explorer program could not see any data on the RAID array. So I think that I need to add the Intel driver. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on how to add a driver to a WinPE image? (I already have the toolkit on a different machine to build the WinPE image.)

Just want to recover some data then will be installing my OS on a 256GB SSD and using 2 of the RAID drives in a RAID 1 array for a backup drive.

TIA!