[yomumafat]

My boss's computer is running a RAID 5 setup with 4x400gb sea gate drives.

He said it mention "something about parity", and now it does not boot into windows.

If I access the raid utility "crtl + i" it only shows 3 drives and says that the raid has failed. It then prompt's "Failed RAID volume detected. Recover volume?"

What can I do to fix it.

I have a spare WD 500GB sata drive here. Do I just install the new drive and tell it to recover the raid?

The problem is my boss's information is very important to him (of coarse no backup :S).

Thanks in advance.

 

[raptor_pa]

In theory yes that should fix it, to be safe however, you should remove the three good drives one at a time and clone them to three other disks marking them, so you can always start over if the rebuild fails.

 

[yomumafat]

Cheers for the response.

My boss wants it ASAP so I just swapped out the faulty drive with a new one.

I entered the intel raid utility and I said yes to the option to recover the volume. It then asked if the new drive was what I wanted to use to replace the faulty one. I said yes again.

It then changed the raid status from "failed" to "Rebuild". At the bottom of the screen it says "Volumes with "rebuild" will be rebuilt within the operating system"

I exit the utility and it will POST again, then after that it will go to a blank black screen and all it does it sit there. There is also no HDD activity.

Is there some kind of live boot OS I need to boot into to let the raid rebuild or something?

 

[yomumafat]

So I stayed back 3 hours after work to try and fix this.

I do not know why the machine will not boot into windows but I could boot into win7 ERD and it would show some of the boss's files (so it cant be 100% dead).

I decided to take a crack at removing the raid, and attaching a new HDD to the PC and load a fresh windows 7. The system would not detect the single drive for some reason (i assume because the bios was set to be raid). So i resorted to setting up a new raid 0 using 2 new hdd's using the SI on board raid controller.

After loading windows 7 (after manually loading the SI raid driver) I installed the intel storage manager program.

Reconnected the original raid to the on-board intel raid controller. And set the boot priority to the new raid0.

Booted into windows and quickly disabled the automatic chkdsk that wanted to start :S

Once in windows, the intel software detected the degraded raid and began to rebuild it. I estimate it should take around 7 hours. So its running over night.

My plan is that once the rebuild is done, I will be able to set it back to being the primary boot device and bob's our uncle.

If not, I should be able to retrieve some/most data using it as a secondary drive when booting to the raid0.

I just thought I'd post this so people don't waste there time repeating anything that's already be done. If anyone has any thought's / comment's I am all ears though.

Cheers

 

[raptor_pa]

Good workaround, please keep us posted!

 

[yomumafat]

So the rebuild is complete.

I am able to access the files, except for the "my documents" folder, which is what I need.

I comes up saying "Files are corrupted and not accessible".

In event viewer it is coming up with ntfs issues, and say's to do a chkdsk /f.

Will running a chkdsk hurt/fix anything?

 

[raptor_pa]

Try taking ownership first, since this is a new install of Windows, the NTFS security permissions will block access to users on the other system. http://www.blogsdna.com/2159/how-to...sions-to-access-files-folder-in-windows-7.htm

 

[yomumafat]

I think it was just permissions.

I just ran a chkdsk /r and after which I was able to back up all the necessary data.

Only 17 out of 17,500 files where missed (all of which were system files).

The system would still not boot however so I just recreated the raid and loaded windows fresh.

Minor victory is MINE

cheers for the help.