Please help me save my raid

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Please help me save my raid

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Joker22

Junior Member

2. August 2006 @ 06:30

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I recently had a short on my computer and had to change my motherboard. Unfortunetly at the time i had a Striped raid set with two of my 300 GB Maxtor Serial HDs. Now with the new board i cant get it to recognize the Raid set. I wanted to know if anyone could give me some info on how to recover a raid set. This would be really helpful considering that almost the entire drive was full of my work. Please help me if you can guys.

System info:
Motherboard - Asus A8n Sli Premium
Prossesor - AMD 4600 Dual Core
Memory - 2GB Dual Channel Kingston
Boot Drive - Western Digital Raptor 67 GB 10K RPM
OS - Windows Xp PRo SP 2

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[color=green]The one he could never forget.[/color]

ozzy214

Senior Member

2. August 2006 @ 09:05

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If the raid chipset is different from old to new then there really isnt hope of recovering the raid I think. You would need the identical chipset and then maybe you could recover it.

I.e. Old board = nforce 4 ultra new board = nforce 4 ultra ...probaly

I.e old board - nforce 4 standard new board = nforce 4 ultra probaly not

The best thing to do is go on ebay and locate the exact replacement board to your old one. Then you should be good. I.e model and make identical. If the work is valuable then it would be worth it to do this.

Also remeber to have a third drive totally seperate for backup purposes. Or even a computer to use as a file server. I have a old 993 pentium 3 with a 9800 xt capture card in it. It works perfectly for backup and is networked to my main rig with a wireless card. Does a good job for storing important stuff and playing movies on my tv...LOL! Only cost 5.00 usd and 60.00 for the agp card..LOL!

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epox mobo EP-9NPAJ
amd 3700+ san diego core oc to 2.50
antec true power 430 watt dual +12 volt rails @ 18 amps each
bfg geforce 6800 gt oc edition
dragon case
2 x 512 DUAL CHANNEL ELIXOR RAM
Ibm P260 dvi & vga 21 inch crt monitor 1600 x 1200 @ 85 htz Oh yeah!!

DoubleDwn

Senior Member

2. August 2006 @ 11:11

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Ozzy hit it right on the head. You need to have the EXACT same RAID chipset for your array to be recognized (still a possibility that it wont see it). Dont take offense to this, but if the stuff is so important, where is the backup??

I would hit ebay hard and find the exact board you used to have. Offload all data, hook drives up to your new board and rebuild the array. You will have to reinstall from scratch (only downside), but you should be good to go afterwards.

Look into getting a large USB external drive for backup of your data. It is SOOO worth the money spent when something like this happens. My tape backups at work saved my ass twice in the past 5 years, even though I was using RAID 5. Array controller goes bye-bye, so does your array.

Good luck.

~Rich

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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 2. August 2006 @ 11:12

Joker22

Junior Member

2. August 2006 @ 19:58

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Ok today I went and picked up the exact same board with the same Raid Controller. I plugged the two drives that were raided into the same controller and pulled up the raid assembly menu that comes up right after bios boot. I can build a raid set using the two drives but it wont allow me to rebuild. Is it possible that unless there in the same spot it wont recognize the Raid? It picks up the drives when i boot into windows and i can even import The 589 GB Volume from what it calls Disk 1. But that doesnt bring back the data. Is there another way of going about it or a program that can resolve a raid assembly issuse? As for why i dont have a back up Some of the files i deal with get rather large. I do work using Maya so the files at times can become a bit cumbersome. Any help would be appreciated and thanks for the help thus far.

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[color=green]The one he could never forget.[/color]

ozzy214

Senior Member

3. August 2006 @ 03:56

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I was speaking from experience. When my epox board died, I went and found another nforce 4 standard chipset and my raid came right back. So Im not sure. Come to think of it I did hook the drives back up in the sequence they were in and it was recognized. So the only thing I can say is hook them up exactly as was before. If that doesnt work, then I imagine your looking at professional recovery techniques. Find a place that specializes in drive retrieval. And next time make sure to back up. It dont cost nothing other that a 5 usd for a old comp to use as a file server and throw a 100 usd drive in it.

Other than that I do think ya sol. Because a raid stripes data across the two, so in esscense half is one drive and half is on another. So I dont know of any programs to recover.....

The other thing is you said ya had a short. Big possibility is the short corrupted the boot sectors or mft or even the data itself, and this is why thedrives cant be read...

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Joker22

Junior Member

3. August 2006 @ 06:35

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I guess that may be. The only reason that i believed the raid assembly had to still be existent is that when i go into the raid configuring utility they both show up as reserved drives and when i boot into windows they respond for a volume of 589 GB. So i think its there some were i just have to find the 64 bit boot sector. Maybe if i swap around the order ill find it. Well here is hoping. And thanks for the help.

[ + quote]

[color=green]The one he could never forget.[/color]

DoubleDwn

Senior Member

3. August 2006 @ 08:10

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RAID drives have to stay in the same order as they were when the array was created. Trial and error, my man. Keep flipping the drives around, and hopefully it will come up detected. Best of luck man.

~Rich

Edit: Check this out. http://www.runtime.org/

Might be able to help you. I downloaded it (RAID reconstructor) but couldnt test it since I dont have a spare array laying around. Looks pretty striaght forward. Once the image is created, you need to get another software (GetDataBack) to copy the image to an alternate drive. I didnt look too far into it, but there may be a charge for the software, so read all teh fine print before you start this.

Edit 2: Do you know the original stripe size?? If so, you may be able to re-create the array on the new mobo. Just dont initialize it. Dont take my word on this, though. If the data is that important, dont risk recreating the array.

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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 3. August 2006 @ 08:28

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