Major Data Loss on RAID-1 - How do I recover?

[rezilient]

Hi there.

I have a P5K-E mobo which has the ICH9R raid controller.

My boot drive is a Raptor 150gb, but for data I have two SATA WD 320gb drives in RAID-1 and it has been running fine; until yesterday.

- when I came home from work and turned on my screen (my desktop is always on), i was looking at a BSOD that I hadn't seen before... it said something about "HARDWARE CHECK EXCEPTION"... searches online lead me to believe there is an underlying hardware problem on my machine

- it began to boot up, but i was surprised it asked to run a CHKDSK on my E: drive (RAID) which isn't the boot volume and typically I wouldn't expect that unless my array puked on me... I allowed the CHKDSK to continue.... the CHKDSK ran pretty fast but I did see the word "DELETED..." a bunch of times which concerned me.

- when the machine finally booted up I checked the volume and sure enough there was DATA missing (lots of it)... clicking some of the folders resulted in "access denied" message, or something like that

- when I checked windows disk management i was surprised to see TWO disks with 320GB instead of just the one RAID array disk... one was showing the correct volume label and mounted to E:, the other was not active and looked like unpartitioned space (i believe)

- system log had hundreds of the following errors:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2. (this is how it began)

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume RAID300. (then millions of these started occurring)

- i rebooted the machine and entered to BIOS... the SATA configuration had changed from RAID to IDE... somehow the RAID broke ... I changed it back to RAID and rebooted

- when I went back in to Windows I can now see the single RAID array in disk management, I'm not getting access denied errors when I click folders, but there is a LOT of data missing.

- one more interesting thing, in My Computer it says free space 134GB... if I recall, this is how much free space was left WITH all my original content... BUT when I add up all the "visible" files and folder on the drive it only adds up to ~70GB... SO in that case the true free space would be more like ~230GB... So I'm hopeful that my data is still in there, somewhere, hopefully with all the same file/folder structure too.

No I don't have any backups, it was a "work in progress" and I never completed a backup of the array.

So where do I go from here? How do I recover this lost data?

If this is just 1 bad disk, can I disconnect a single disk and see the missing data?

[GDH]

Hi,

Sounds like your RAID really hit a hurdle!

Download Recover My Files from http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe

Run the program from your C: drive and select "Complete Format Recover" and click next.

When you get to the drive selection screen, do you see a "physical" drive listed which is the same size as your combined RAID drives? If so, select it. In the file type selection window, use only the default selected files, start the search, and let me know if you can preview any of the files found in "File Type View" of the search results screen whilst the search is in progress. Also let me know if the "OS Items" number in the progress window starts rising.

Thank you.