What does the MediaShield Utility (CRTL+S) say? Is your RAID array still "healthy"?
It probably will do that, since it is a RAID0 array. With a RAID1 it wouldn’t be such a risk.
This is the feeling I have as well.
well I tried to some more reboots and it never lets me boot with both drives. If I plug in the second drive after we pass the raid bios detection screen, it does show up in device manager sometimes, but sometimes I have to rescan for hardware changes first and then it has the ver 10 driver again. when that happens it doesn’t show up in the storage control panel.
the Mediashield utility (f10) will not load with both drives but with just the first one the array has an error (missing drive obvs) but the drive itself is healthy. Oddly, when the storage control panel in windows does detect the second drive as a free drive, it claims its healthy. I beg to differ.
So the next time I can detect both drives in the storage control panel, I am pretty much going to just delete the array, make a new one, try to avoid initializing, partitioning or formatting, and reboot and see what happens. maybe at that point a software file recovery tool will work on the drive. I quick formatted a drive a few months ago and was able to get files back in this manner.
I don’t think I have any more options unless you know of a software that can let us custom edit raid partition tables on drives and “fix” the array. Perhaps I’ll google this idea first.
Yes, please try that, but I am not very optimistic regarding the chances to succeed this way.
The most plausibe explanation for your issue is, that the track0 (hidden storage unit with the partition table) of your second RAID member either has become corrupt or has been deleted/overwritten by any action done in the past.
In this case I doubt, that any software will bring back your data.
Success!
Once i connected the raid drives to a non raid enabled sata ports and booted into windows, Raid Reconstructor was able to easily read the partition information and create a virtual image file which i could then mount with their captain nemo software which is used to read all sorts of foreign file systems. I can now see and recover all my data!
The software cost me a few bucks but it has free upgrades and i wanted a reliable way to recover corrupted data from drives in general. I might start a local service doing this to recover the cost of the software.
Fernando, I want to thank you so much for your time and effort. Without your help I never would have gotten this far. I owe you a debt of gratitude which I will try to repay with the donate button. My credit card is maxed now so I can’t afford a lot but I feel you have earned it.
Thanks again
That is awesome - congratulations! I am glad, that I could help you to solve your problem.
To be honest I didn’t expect this success anymore after all the bad reports I got from your side. At least your experience confirms my general opinion: Never give up unless it is really hopeless.
Enjoy the data you were able to recover now!
Greetings from Germany
Fernando
I wasn’t holding out hope either. The surprising thing was how easily raid Reconstructor/Captain Nemo recovered the data. Those tools have alot of features to recover badly corrupted data that I didn’t need because there wasn’t really anything wrong with the data itself. It can probe and guess all the raid parameters automatically. Pretty slick really. There is a pretty good chance had I just started with this, I probably didn’t need to buy the new motherboard since I am currently accessing the array via a software controller and not the nforce4 controller.
Either way i am pretty happy and I hope this thread will help somebody else one day. Cheers!