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raid 5 recovery issue

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sipherlucian

New Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2010
hi i have 4 x 1tb drives in my computer, the raid setup was a bit awkward, 500gb assigned to raid 0 for the OS, and the rest assigned to raid 5.

recently one drive died and i had to replace it, i removed the drive and put in a new one and went to the BIOS. the friend that built the computer recommended deleting the raid 0 in the BIOS and then rebuild the raid 5.

so i deleted raid 0, the BIOS saw the new drive and wanted to rebuild, but i needed an OS on another drive of course so i connected a fifth with an OS.

anyway my motherboard was fried and the raid adapter was part of the board so i never got to rebuild.
i got the same board again, but i needed to access my files fast as i had a deadline in work.

a data recovery company want 3000 euro for data recovery and im not able to pay that right now, but i think i can still rebuild the raid 5 on the new board, anyone have any idea if it will work? does the existing state of the raid stay on the hard drives or the boards raid adapter, im not sure if the new board will realize that there is a raid on the remaining 3 drives and that the 4th is there for a rebuild

please help im really stuck and dont know what to do
 
If you enable RAID in the BIOS the same as it was before, the drives should be recognized and you should be able to access them normally. You can read the data and use the drives without the 4th drive in the array there at all, but the 4th drive would be required in order to rebuild the array so its functional as RAID5.

Have you setup the BIOS yet?
 
no i havent my new board was having issues think its psu related so im waiting on a new psu before i connect them to the new board, ive had similar replies on other forums so im starting to doubt the honesty of the data recovery company, intel had a raid diagnostic tool does anyone know what this tool was i cant find it? i tested my raid when the drive first died and it showed a physical error on one drive the other 3 were fine now the recovery company is telling me there is another error on a different drive that will make rebuild impossible anybody know if they could back this up with data???
 
It should work on the new board just fine. Just set it to RAID mode.

If it's an Intel ICHxR you can probably use any board that uses that same chipset or newer. If you were on ICH9R before, I bet any board w/ ICH9R or ICH10R would recognize and rebuild it.

Edit: I was slow to finish so I got beat! In RAID5 if you have 1 drive go out, and then have another error on one of the remaining drives then it's toast. I would try messing w/ it yourself before paying that kind of money, though.

This is why I don't recommend RAID5 as a backup strategy. RAID5 is for uptime, not backups. Too many things that can go wrong in the chain.
 
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hey folks thanks a lot for your advice i really appreciate it! im not dealing with the recovery centre now, they said they cant back up the claim that a second drive is damaged, convenient! is there any software that can check if a drive has data on it?
see they didnt even tell me which ones were damaged or empty, thats what your money pays for these days, more questions and no solution!
 
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