I have had my PC set up with 4 HDDs. One is a 640GB with dual boot Vista and XP and the other 3 are each 1TB (all the same SeaGate 7200.11 models) in RAID 5 (2 in use, 1 parity).
This morning I turn on my PC and during boot the computer tells me that 2.1 and 3.1 ports where 2 of the 3 HDDs are located have an error. It gives me the option to rebuild and delete.
I am in bit of a panic mode because I have about 1.5TBs of Data I need from these drives. Can anyone advise on what I should do?
RAID 5 is parity even without a spare disk...you can loose a whole drive without loosing data. I am guessing you are using fake-raid with the onboard sata ports?
You can try unplugging the "failed" drives, starting the computer (let it boot up to windows), then turning off the system and reconnecting the drives. I doubt both failed at once, so the problem is probably in the fakeraid bios...it's just a matter of getting it to see the drives again, then getting it to realize that they are part of the RAID5 array.
If I am wrong, and you do have a hardware raid card (if you have one, you would already know)...then try moving one of the "failed" drives to the open port on the card and see if it detects it there.
The good news is that you probably have not lost any data, at least one of the "failed" drives should still be working.
Oh, and be sure to check that the SATA cables and power cables are fully plugged and tight. (maybe i should have put this part first)
I have never heard of a RAID 5 array that uses a parity disc, the parity is usualy spread evenly across all discs (it does equate to the size of one disc however, which is why you will only see say 200GB in a three disc system of 100GB each, 300GB in a 4 disc system, 900GB in a 10 disc system etc). So i have learned something here.
The only thing i can suggest is to ensure your drive cables are secure, if indeed you have a parity disc and you are lucky enough that this is the one without the error, then that will be able to rebuild the array.
With only 3 drives, he does not have a parity disk, but he does have parity (spread across all three disks).
If the drives cannot be recombined from bios, they can still be combined from within windows (using software that you might have to buy) and the data can then be copied to other drives.
...This is why I bought my hardware RAID card, my onboard RAID did the same thing to my RAID5 array twice. Onboard software raid seems to work fine for RAID0 or RAID1 or even RAID10, but is very problematic (plus super slow) for RAID5.
1) Checked over the connections, everything seemed fine. In Vista-64bit the disks did not show up in Disk Management. Under XP-32bit the disks show in Disk Management. DIsk0 is the 640 with my OS on it (not in the RAID).
Disk 1 shows 1863.02GB and healthy but does not have a file system assigned (ex NTFS). Disk 2 shows as not initialized and unallocated as 931GB and disk 3 shows the same as disk 1.
2) I flashed the BIOS on my P5N72-T board and the disks showed up in Vista, rebooted and enabled the RAID function for the 3 SATA ports that the 3 1TBs but still gives the error.
3) I am using file scavanger to try and retrive the data....
