Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 I have an ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard. I have one Samsung 840 Pro SSD and four 500GB Western Digital RE4 HDDs making up a 3TB RAID5 array. I have my home server virtualized on this array which is 1.6TB with precious photos and downloads. It really is pretty simple how this happened. I've been running all my drives in RAID mode, my SSD included as a stand alone. I wanted to optimize the SSD properly with Samsung Magician. I needed AHCI mode and through some research found that technically any stand alone drive on a port set as RAID will automatically run as AHCI. The Magician software was disagreeing saying it wasn't AHCI and so I couldn't enable some awesome wiz-bang features. I switched to AHCI mode on the Intel controller, rebooted, and the SSD was detected in AHCI mode just fine. RAID was broken (obviously) so I rebooted and switched back to RAID mode but then for some reason two drives from the array are now marked as non-member disks making the array failed. Booting into Windows, the RST software says the same. I've done data recovery before but not a RAID5. Based on my what I know about RAID and the research I've done, I've found that deleting the array and recreating it using the exact same configuration is harmless and this is how you should start recovering data. From there I'm using R-Studio, GetDataBack, Recuva to scan for my data... This is one source of information I've been using: http://www.overclock.net/t/478557/howto-recover-intel-raid-non-member-disk-error It's been about a week and each scan takes at least 6 hours and I haven't really had much luck in finding my data intact. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If you're hear to preach backup to me, don't bother. I just need help in getting this back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Draconian Guppy Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 Sorry, can't help, but have a question for you. According to wikepedia: A RAID 5 comprises block-level striping with distributed parity. Unlike in RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives. It requires that all drives but one be present to operate. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that no data is lost. RAID 5 requires at least three disks Shouldn't your data be on the other 3 drives? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Author Share Posted February 19, 2014 Sorry, can't help, but have a question for you. According to wikepedia: A RAID 5 comprises block-level striping with distributed parity. Unlike in RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives. It requires that all drives but one be present to operate. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that no data is lost. RAID 5 requires at least three disks Shouldn't your data be on the other 3 drives? Yes. I'm confident the data is still physically there and untouched on all four drives. The array is rebuilt and "optimal" but it's unpartitioned space since partitioning/formatting it WOULD screw me. The trick is to recreate the array and run recovery utilities on the unpartitioned space. But I have been unsuccessful as of yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
papercut2008uk Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 (not an expert on Raid) do you have any of the HDD's on the white SATA ports on your motherboard? if you do, then it might be the reason your having issues with the setup, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Author Share Posted February 19, 2014 (not an expert on Raid) do you have any of the HDD's on the white SATA ports on your motherboard? if you do, then it might be the reason your having issues with the setup, No I don't. In fact if any were, they wouldn't show up in RST nor would I be able to recreate the array. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted February 19, 2014 MVC Share Posted February 19, 2014 The most important question... You did not re-initialize the array after recreating it did you? Also, why were there no backups? Why was the SSD included in this array? Did I read that correctly? That you had a RAID 5 with 4 member disks with one being an SSD into a single RAID "virtual disk"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Draconian Guppy Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 Yes. I'm confident the data is still physically there and untouched on all four drives. The array is rebuilt and "optimal" but it's unpartitioned space since partitioning/formatting it WOULD screw me. The trick is to recreate the array and run recovery utilities on the unpartitioned space. But I have been unsuccessful as of yet. Ah makes sense, Good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Author Share Posted February 19, 2014 The most important question... You did not re-initialize the array after recreating it did you? Also, why were there no backups? Why was the SSD included in this array? Did I read that correctly? That you had a RAID 5 with 4 member disks with one being an SSD into a single RAID "virtual disk"? NO I did NOT re-initialize! The SSD was a stand alone drive but since you can't enable/disable AHCI/RAID per port, the SSD was on the same controller, not associated with the RAID at all. Since then I have moved the SSD to a second SATA3 controller on the board so it's completely separate. As for the backup, I did have one but my server had grown too large for me to backup anymore. I've been meaning to get a 4TB HDD for this... This tinkering and subsequent broken RAID are on me just not being careful enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted February 19, 2014 MVC Share Posted February 19, 2014 NO I did NOT re-initialize! The SSD was a stand alone drive but since you can't enable/disable AHCI/RAID per port, the SSD was on the same controller, not associated with the RAID at all. Since then I have moved the SSD to a second SATA3 controller on the board so it's completely separate. As for the backup, I did have one but my server had grown too large for me to backup anymore. I've been meaning to get a 4TB HDD for this... This tinkering and subsequent broken RAID are on me just not being careful enough. What happened overall? The RAID should have been marked as "FAILED" when 2 of the drives failed to appear. Intel RST stores its RAID information on the HDD so it doesn't matter what port it is plugged into. But you also mentioned that the RAID array has undergone a REBUILD. How would it do this without having detected the drives back again. Or did you manually re-add them to the array and let a rebuild occur? If you did this then the data is gone. A rebuild is the same as an initialize when you've sustained a multiple drive loss in a RAID 5. As there is not enough parity data to restore... +Mirumir 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
astrokat Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 Strange that the disks were detected as non-members when you enabled raid again. I believe in the past, my systems remembered. Since you deleted and re-created the array, I don't think there is much you can do now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Author Share Posted February 19, 2014 What happened overall? The RAID should have been marked as "FAILED" when 2 of the drives failed to appear. Intel RST stores its RAID information on the HDD so it doesn't matter what port it is plugged into. But you also mentioned that the RAID array has undergone a REBUILD. How would it do this without having detected the drives back again. Or did you manually re-add them to the array and let a rebuild occur? If you did this then the data is gone. A rebuild is the same as an initialize when you've sustained a multiple drive loss in a RAID 5. As there is not enough parity data to restore... The RAID was failed with two drives missing... I re-created the array is all. Exactly as it was originally. No rebuild. No initialization. I know the metadata is stored on each drive, but I am sure they are plugged in the same ports regardless. (There were some people in my research that had to have the drives plugged in in the correct order for recovery utilities to find anything). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
srbeen Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 This won't help fix the problem you are in, but I think if you disconnected the power from each RAID drive before screwing around, you'd likely still have an in-tact array. I don't know how the magician software works though, but I presume your array didn't need to be present. I'm suprised you had no option of exporting the pool/vdevs/array/RAID config either, which would have really helped in this situation. Also 1 backup isn't honestly enough. there should be 2. One on-site in case of castrophic failure (like you got yourself into), and one off-site, in case of fire/robbery/spontaneous combustion/etc. I have been in this boat before and its a gut-sinking situation which I never resolved. I was unable to recover my data off a raid1 array after simply connecting the sata ports to the wrong spots and the controller thinking they were new disks. I would try asking in more places, possibly reddit /r/techsupport or one of their related reddits may have a more focused crowd. EDIT - Possibly.... your raid may think its 0 bytes big right now, because theres nothing in it. You need to somehow make it think its full of data, so it may show the previously copied data? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted February 19, 2014 Share Posted February 19, 2014 Hello, I read as the SSD being part of the RAID5 too! :laugh: glad that got cleared up. What does booting up a LiveCD do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 19, 2014 Author Share Posted February 19, 2014 I thought it was pretty clear that the SSD was a stand alone drive in RAID mode since that's what I said :s I added a few choice words for clarification. This won't help fix the problem you are in, but I think if you disconnected the power from each RAID drive before screwing around, you'd likely still have an in-tact array. I don't know how the magician software works though, but I presume your array didn't need to be present.Yes, this whole thing could have easily been avoided. I know. At the same time, the freakin' metadata should have been fine. The Magician software has nothing to do with the RAID situation, it's just background information. I would try asking in more places, possibly reddit /r/techsupport or one of their related reddits may have a more focused crowd.Thanks for the suggestion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mirumir Subscriber¹ Posted February 20, 2014 Subscriber¹ Share Posted February 20, 2014 I re-created the array is all. Exactly as it was originally. No rebuild. No initialization. You should have just let Intel RST fix the error the first time without doing anything manually (re-creating it). Sorry it's happened to you. I've been in exact same situation many times before, and, naturally, the first time it happened to me years ago got me worried too. RAID5 is also one of the least reliable options on Intel RST from my experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Hello, I would try asking in more places, possibly reddit /r/techsupport or one of their related reddits may have a more focused crowd.Sorry for going offtopic but comparing Neowin to Reddit is a joke :laugh: Draconian Guppy 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 20, 2014 Author Share Posted February 20, 2014 You should have just let Intel RST fix the error the first time without doing anything manually (re-creating it).There was nothing RST would have done to "fix" it. RAID5 without two members is a dead RAID5, period. Hello, Sorry for going offtopic but comparing Neowin to Reddit is a joke :laugh: That remains to be seen... Hopefully someone has some good suggestions... srbeen 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apenava Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Hi there, some time ago i had a similar problem, disks fell out of raid and i could't put them back together. I had some important data on them and i did a little digging. I used an app called file scavenger to connect disks in some sort of a virtual raid and i got all of my data back. I had forgotten the details on how exactly to do it, but if i managed to retrieve the data, you should be able to. Good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devobtch Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 hi http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/kb_raid5_article.htm and this may help http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/library/raid5-recovery.aspx hope you get you data back devobtch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Hello, That remains to be seen... Hopefully someone has some good suggestions...Reddit is like the underage version of 4chan...which sadly in a sense makes it worst than 4chan but oh well... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ridgeburner Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Hello, Reddit is like the underage version of 4chan...which sadly in a sense makes it worst than 4chan but oh well... Hey not that I'm at all picking sides or anything but as a member of Reddit and many of it's subreddits I feel obligated to tell you that if you truly believe this -- you haven't spent any time on Reddit whatsoever. Not only is it vastly larger and more active than 4chan or these forums (which I love and have loved for a LONG TIME don't get me wrong) but I've seen a ton of extremely intelligent people helping others with their problems and concerns. Of course on every public forum/blog/whatever you have kiddies that like to Troll -- but to generalize the entire community as "an underage version of 4chan" is insulting to me, the reddit community, and ALL of it's members. srbeen and Bryan R. 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
evacc44 Posted February 21, 2014 Share Posted February 21, 2014 ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted February 21, 2014 Share Posted February 21, 2014 Hello, Hey not that I'm at all picking sides or anything but as a member of Reddit and many of it's subreddits I feel obligated to tell you that if you truly believe this -- you haven't spent any time on Reddit whatsoever. Not only is it vastly larger and more active than 4chan or these forums (which I love and have loved for a LONG TIME don't get me wrong) but I've seen a ton of extremely intelligent people helping others with their problems and concerns. Of course on every public forum/blog/whatever you have kiddies that like to Troll -- but to generalize the entire community as "an underage version of 4chan" is insulting to me, the reddit community, and ALL of it's members.Great post and maybe calling it the underage version of 4chan was far fetched... Having said that, being "vastly larger and more active than" x site does not make it better, at all. Over 95% of things posted on 4chan is pure BS. Reddit hovers under/over the 50% BS mark and I imagine there are great members and great topics that would find a better home here on Neowin which has a small amount of BS (due to a great staff). That being said, lets not go offtopic further as the OP needs help and this thread/site is NOT for talking about other sites. OP, did you try a LiveCD like I commented? srbeen 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T3X4S Posted February 21, 2014 Share Posted February 21, 2014 How is a 4x 500GB HDD in RAID 5 a 3TB storage ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 21, 2014 Author Share Posted February 21, 2014 How is a 4x 500GB HDD in RAID 5 a 3TB storage ? Sorry you're right, it's four 1TB drives. I used to have four 500GB drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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