Any RAID experts around?

[BadDragon]

Hey up guys BadDragon here. Belive it or not even I'm currently out of my league (and i consider myself with a masters in computing and the fact i build and repair servers and PCs for a living to be pretty good at it.)

Here is the issue:

I have a server (it is the home network NAS, Teamspeak, web and everything else server for my lot) it has 2x RAID-5 arrays on an intel controller 2x RAID 1 arrays on a marvel controller and assorted other spare drives on a silicon image controller.)

I have just installed the new RAID 1 arrays to back the old raid 5s onto (basically the raid-5s were 3x 1.5tb drives each the raid 1s are 2x 6tbs each)

However... one of the RAID 5s just failed. Only one drive mind you, thinking it seemed to be a loose power cable i shut off reattached it and just to be sure ran a full disk intensive test on all disks in the array from a dos boot disk (parted magic if your are interested) all came back A-ok. Rebooted. Told it to mend the array (this is where the trouble started) got half way through and died at almost exactly 50%.

The array now no longer even shows and says it is unmountable. The controller still sees it as a 3tb raid 5 array, the system in general sees it as partition with a 750gb total drive space and tells me it is uninitialised (occasionally it will change its mind and say it is 3tb when the moon is in the 8th house and one of the angels happens to be doing a handstand).

I HAVE to recover the data from this drive but all my raid recovery tools (i have many) still see it as one drive and refuse to let me rebuild it or see it as anything else. I have introduced a spare failover disk to the array and it refuses to rebuild with it. It just tells me the damned thing is inaccessible. I have tried most stuff i can think of.

Can anyone help? I'm open to suggestions.

[Altecice]

By the sounds of things you might have had the worst luck ever. When mending the array when it turned off at 50% it may have been rebuilding the data map (bitmap or whatever its called today) You might actually find that not even the drive knows what data it has on it now as it was turned off at the wrong time. Could be bad news for you ... Like you said even recovery software cant find the files.