raid 5 rebuild issue

[sipherlucian]

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

 

[Chewy509]

What motherboard and what raid controller?

Most RAID setups store the RAID meta-data on the connected HDDs, so as long as you have the same RAID controller, you should be able to just plug them in and the RAID BIOS will see a degraded RAID5 array and a spare to which to rebuild with.

But this is HIGHLY dependent of the RAID controller and how well it's implementation is.

Otherwise if you have a spare PC with enough ports, there are a few different types of software out there that will let you get your data off the degraded array. I haven't had to use any of them, so can't recommend anything. (I tend to maintain a working backup system, just for event's like these, which means I've never needed to use them).

 

[Bozo]

I have had success replacing dead RAID controllers onto existing hard drives.
If your new RAID controller is the same as the old one, it should work.

 

[sipherlucian]

hey guys thanks a lot, the motherboard is an asus z7s ws, raid controller is on the board.

 

[sipherlucian]

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 because the intel raid diagnostic didnt show any error, so the error would have to have happened when the motherboard blew which was a power related problem, i really really doubt that would have caused a new error on a drive that wasnt physical ???

 

[Stereodude]

Whatever you do, make sure you set the new mobo to "RAID" in the BIOS before connecting the drives and powering up the system with them connected. If you boot with them connected and the BIOS set to AHCI or IDE the controller may overwrite the metadata on the drives and then when you change it to RAID it won't see the array.

 

[Handruin]

I believe a few here have tried and used the GetDataBack tool and I see they also have a RAID Reconstructor tool available.

They both have demos you can try and if they work, it's far cheaper to purchase a license than to spend the 3000 euros you mentioned earlier. however, I don't know if right now is the right time to try those pieces of software in case of the situation that Stereodude described.

 

[sipherlucian]

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!

 

[Bozo]

What Handruin said.