Desperate! Broadcom MegaRaid RAID 5 Reconstructing, Windows 10 restarted, now shows to be unformatted volume

[Fizban11]

I need help...I'm desperate and completely stressed out!  I carefully built a new PC this year, which I try to do every 6 years or so, with the idea to convert my JBOD in W10 to my first ever RAID for my PLEX server.  I have over 45TB'ish worth of movies, mostly Blu-Ray/4K and TV shows from Blu-Ray and OTA.  It represents over 3 years worth of content that I have slowly acquired. 

 

Please tell me someone out there knows exactly what to do and help can me save all my entertainment media files!

 

What happened:

I had a SAS drive fail in the RAID 5 array...no big deal, as Seagate is usually timely and professional. Dealing with Seagate this time was a complete nightmare.  Eventually, it was correctly replaced and they also offered me a complementary drive for the time spent and hassle.  I gladly accepted, received the new drive and promptly began the reconstruction after adding the new drive, which showed to be complete in 17 days or so.  My PLEX server was alive and well and I could see my array in Windows and it was accessible.  Well...I forgot to disable Windows updates, which installed an update and auto-restarted within just an hour or so of the beginning of the reconstruction.  This was Thursday.  When I realized the PC had restarted, I checked to make sure all was still right with the world.  It wasn't.  Now Windows can see the volume, still as 65.48TB, but it shows to be UNFORMATTED!  Panic has set in.  And no, before someone chastises me, I don't have the data backed up because I don't have another $3500 to purchase another 6 hard drives.

 

I checked the MSM manager and it shows that the RAID 5 volume is Optimal at 98.224TB and still reconstructing, currently at 5% after 48 hours and shows to be done in 45 days - my guess is the scan I am performing with EASEUS (below) is slowing down the reconstruction?

 

Steps I took were limited:

I contacted Broadcom MegaRaid HBA support

I was told that Windows just lost the partition information

I was told to use EASEUS software to scan the volume for missing partition information

I am currently running that scan - Quick scan results showed no missing info, so it continued into a sector scan, which stands at 20% complete as of this post

What I am confused about is that Windows can see the partition, just showing as "unformatted"

 

My system:

MSI Prestige X570 Creation

AMD 5950X

Crucial Ballistix 3600MHz RGB - 64GB (2x32GB - obviously single channel - planning to duplicate in the Spring)

EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra (it's the only GPU I could get my hands on!)

Samsung 980 Pro 1TB - Windows 10

Seasonic Prime 1300W Platinum

EK AIO Basic 360 (top mount)

LG Optical drives (WH16NS 60 and 40 for loading)

Fractal Define 7XL (it's on the floor, but up on custom caster wheels courtesy of Wendell @ Level1Techs)

Samsung 850 EVO SSD (PLEX transcoding directory)

Seagate 16TB SATA drive for general storage

Broadcom/LSI/Avago 9361-8i RAID card

Seagate Exos X18 SAS 12/GB/s ST18000NM04J ( was x5, now x6 as RAID 5 - these drives were ~$450 back in March, now nearly $600 each)

Noctua 140mm Black Chromax front fans x3

Lian Li UNI SL140 x 2, rear and 1 under the RAID card to keep it cool

Lian Li UNI SL120 x3, EK radiator

 

This is my most desperate hour!

 

Ryan

Edited September 18, 2021 by Fizban11

[Kilrah]

Moved to Servers and NAS.

 

I would NOT run a scan while the reconstruction is running, only afterwards. 

Will be a long wait to see if anything is recoverable. And once reconstruction is complete before running easeus if your RAID card works under linux I'd boot off a live linux USB and see if the partition can be read there, linux is sometimes more tolerant to the partition info being missing/corrupted.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Ya got backups?

 

How much do you care about data? ID turn it all off now and send it off to data recovery, this seems. The rebuild could be rebuilding incorrect data, so I wouldn't let that run.

 

If it was just a bad volume info, ease us would have found that quicky, so something wrongs seems to have happened here.

[Fizban11]

48 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Ya got backups?

 

How much do you care about data? ID turn it all off now and send it off to data recovery, this seems. The rebuild could be rebuilding incorrect data, so I wouldn't let that run.

 

If it was just a bad volume info, ease us would have found that quicky, so something wrongs seems to have happened here.

I appreciate you responding.  As I said above, no I don't have backups - too costly for more HDD's.  I do have most of the individual movie discs, but it would take a year or more for me to get back what I had.  Also, once the reconstruction begins, it will not stop.  At least, according to Broadcom.

[Fizban11]

50 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Moved to Servers and NAS.

 

I would NOT run a scan while the reconstruction is running, only afterwards. 

Will be a long wait to see if anything is recoverable. And once reconstruction is complete before running easeus if your RAID card works under linux I'd boot off a live linux USB and see if the partition can be read there, linux is sometimes more tolerant to the partition info being missing/corrupted.

Per your advice, I  cancelled the sector scan in favor of letting the reconstruction proceed unhindered.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Fizban11 said:

Per your advice, I  cancelled the sector scan in favor of letting the reconstruction proceed unhindered.

Id stop that rebuild now, and send it to data recovery, that could be rebuilding bad data.

 

3 minutes ago, Fizban11 said:

I appreciate you responding.  As I said above, no I don't have backups - too costly for more HDD's.  I do have most of the individual movie discs, but it would take a year or more for me to get back what I had.  Also, once the reconstruction begins, it will not stop.  At least, according to Broadcom.

HOw much is that time worth? Id send it to the pros now if you don't want to rerip all the files. Won't be cheap, but gonna be your best hope now by far.

 

Or make a image of all the drives now.

[Kilrah]

If backups were out of budget recovery will be too. 

[Pixel5]

while we are at it i would also highly recommend unraid for your use case of storing movies.

in case of a failure of more then your parity disk you would at least still have the original data on the disks that are still alive thanks to it not being a raid.