ICH9R RAID 5 Recovery

This is a 5x500 RAID 5 array on an ICH9R, Storage Manager 7.6, Vista x64, on a Gigabyte P35-DS3P.

After Storage Manager seemed to fail during a rebuild of degraded array, and Windows shutdown hung displaying 'shutting down', the system shows 4 drives good, on 'offline', but the array as 'failed' and non-bootable.

Question 1: why? One failed drive should be degraded, no failed

Question 2: can you move an array to a new motherboard without loosing the array? That is the array specific to a controller and motherboard? Doesn't seem like it should be.

Question 3: what is the controller reading to decide it is 'failed'? If it is bios, can it be reset? If it is on the disk, can it be bit twiddled with a utility?

Question 4: is there any other way for this to get recognized as a valid, degraded, array?

Thanks,

David

Go into Crtl-i on bootup, it hopefully will say raid has failed would you like to try to rebuild or something like that, you say yes it will make it degraded and when you boot into windows it should rebuild for you but it will take a while 12+ hours easy and you probably should not use the computer when its rebuilding, if something was to go wrong you could lose everything when its in its degraded state.

You can put the drives on another ICHR9 board but it wont make a difference should detect the same thing, but you could try.

Do the above, I had a raid 5 that was being rebuilt and had a BSOD and when it rebooted it said raid failed, thought I lost everything, just go to crtl-i and the first thing something should pop up to make it degraded again so it can rebuild.

'Degraded' is the message if rebuildable. 'Failed' requires lossing all the data on the drives, which should not be the case if 4 of 5 are good.

The Intel software does not offer rebuild from Ctrl+I...you need to use the Matrix Storage Manager utility in the operating system, which intern requires the drives to be bootable, and therefore in a degraded mode.

The question is how to get them there.

Do you just have the Raid5 array, or do you have a separate O/S partition on another drive / before the Raid5?

If you have either of the latter... do a very quick rebuild of the O/S, install Intel Matrix Manager, and see what it can achieve. Agreed though... afaik, degraded = repairable. Failed = goodbye

Yet another reason why I'm moving to a 4 x drive Raid0/Raid10 array, plus a hot spare.