RAID 10 Recover Array

[Guntharia]

Please let the computer GODS take pity on me. Please let me recover my data. 

 

Background:

I was working on the water cooled computer. Changed out all the hoses, reservoir, etc. I finished and booted up to work on my Aquaero 5XT. I saw they had new 2016-2 software so I installed that. To get it working I needed to update the Aquaero firmware as well. I did that then restarted the computer and had nothing, no boot, no BIOS or anything. I was just stuck on reading the A2 code on the motherboard. I tried the all the various video ports on my two Radeon graphics cards and the one mini display port on my EVGA N77. Well after some trial and error, clearing CMOS, etc. I finally got the computer to boot by switching to BIOS #2 on the motherboard. So it seems the Aquaero firmware corrupted my BIOS (not sure why that would affect motherboard BIOS). So I restored my computer to the day before and then was able to boot back into BIOS #1 which had an updated BIOS compared to #2. I reinstalled the Aquaero software and the firmware again without any issues that time. I thought I was good to go.

 

Problem: 

I now released my RAID 10 Array was broken. I have one OCZ SSD which has my operating system and all my programs. I have 4 6TB WD Reds on RAID 10 and 2 of the hard drive were broken from the array "non-RAID" hard drives. I have been reading up on this because I absolutely do not want to loose my data which should still be on the drives to the best of my knowledge. I went into the Intel Rapid Storage software and deleted the two drives and recreated my RAID 10. I did not move or rearrange any of the SATA cables when recreating the new RAID array. 

 

Questions:

1. I want to recover my data and I think I still have that option maybe. I think alot of people use test disk and I am willing to pay for software if there is something better. I have scanned my hard drive with test disk but the program looks a little different from the instructions and I cant really tell if my data and partitions are correctly listed to attempt the recovery. I do not want to go into this step unless I am 100% sure. I just dont want to go into a step that I cant recover from and am terrified of loosing all my data if it isn't already lost. I need help here and would be the world to me if I can recover my lost data. I thought going to RAID 10 would keep me safe but seems to be a real headache. 

 

2. Short question I'm pretty sure the EVGA N77  is a big P.O.S. motherboard. If I stay with the same company or not is there a way to keep my RAID array and upgrade to a newer motherboard. Not sure if this question should come before or after the first question. If my data is completely lost then it wont matter at all, if I am able to recover it then it does matter. 

 

[scottyseng]

15 minutes ago, Guntharia said:

-snip-

Hold on, so you had a RAID 10 array with the 4 6TB drives, and after changing BIOS, two of them were dropped from the array? Then afterwards, you readded the two drives to the surviving RAID 10 array?

 

You should not have recreated the RAID 10 array. There's a high chance you probably overwrote what was existing in the array (RAID wipes each block out when you build an array). You should've left the drives alone and used some third party software to try to scan and retrieve the array.

RAID10 will survive only if one different drive dies in each pair of drives. Judging by your luck, I think two drives disappeared in the same pair, therefore destroying the array. I think RAID 6 would be only array that would survive that, but very few RAIDs would survive a motherboard BIOS corruption (If it "killed" 3 drives, all RAID levels wouldn't survive that). I think what happened is that you probably reset the motherboard, and all drives were changed back to ACHI mode. Somehow the RAID controller probably thought all of the drives were "dead".

 

Finally, RAID isn't a backup. It's to help the system tolerate some failure. It isn't failsafe. Nothing in technology is. You should have some kind of external drive backing up the system.

 

I agree though, I haven't heard too many good things about EVGA's BIOS on their motherboards.

[Guntharia]

I was hoping not to hear that. There were 2 drives that were surviving and the other 2 drives were then changed to "non-raid".  I was following along with this:

 

1. Reset both HDs to non-member using Intel BIOS utility - the utility warns that all data will be lost - in fact only metadata is lost and can be recreated using steps below.

2. Create a new array with identical settings as the broken array. It is critical that the HDs are in the array the same order as before. I was reconnecting the drives several times and lost track of correct order. Because of that I had to go through the steps twice (I guessed wrong the first time).

3. Get TestDisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org. I used Windows version (I installed a new Vista on a separate HD for this purpose).

4. Run TestDisk according to steps on the web site. If your HDs are connected in correct order, TestDisk should find the lost partition(s) within a few seconds. It ran for several hours, scanning my array and never found anything because I had HDs were connected in wrong order. After I changed the order and restarted from step #1 TestDisk found the missing partition immediately.

5. Have the TestDisk write the fixed partition table to the drive and reboot.

6. Now all your data on the array should be readable but the system might not boot (it didn't for me).

7. Run Vista repair from installation CD to fix the MBR.

 

Step 2 said to recreate the array with the same settings. I can't imagine that anything was physically written to the drives though!? Maybe I'm SOL but I am still going to try to recover I'm just not sure exactly how. I should have never touched the array until I posted this first which was stupid. 

[KuJoe]

3 hours ago, Guntharia said:

I went into the Intel Rapid Storage software and deleted the two drives and recreated my RAID 10. I did not move or rearrange any of the SATA cables when recreating the new RAID array. 

Your data is probably gone. A RAID10 setup can survive 2 drive failures as long as it's the "right" 2 drives (2 mirrored drives from different stripes). The fact that you recreated the RAID10 basically tells your RAID controller "here's 4 clean drives, overwrite them". The good news is that the Intel software probably doesn't do a complete initialization of the drives so if you didn't do anything to the RAID since rebuilding it, you might be able to get some recovery software or hire a data recovery company to get back some of the data. My advice is to immediately pull the drives from your computer to prevent any data from being overwritten.

 

Lastly, this is why I do not recommend FakeRAID. Software RAID would have been a much better option and much easier to recover in this case.

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, Guntharia said:

-snip-

I find it kind of odd that it would tell you to recreate the array. I mean if you did full initialization, it would flat out wipe the array (At least with hardware RAID). RAID 10 isn't an expandable array either. Usually the third party programs tell you turn all of the drives to ACHI and have you copy whatever it can find to an external drive.

 

Yeah, I think if you had lucked out and you lost the "right" two drives, your array would still be alive (Just degraded). I think since your array is broken (You lost the wrong two drives), it probably is trying to overwrite the entire drive array with blanks to make a fresh new array. Luckily if it's a quick initialization, you might not have overwritten all of your data.

 

Please disconnect the drives now and do not mess with them though. I would recommend talking to the peeps at werecoverdata (what Linus there used) and hope they can attempt to find something there...

 

I have to admit though, I'm really surprised that controller actually managed to screw up your BIOS though. I would've unplugged the drives before doing the CMOS reset though. Usually RAID settings are never retained in Intel Onboard RAID. I'm sorry that your BIOS screwed up to the point where you got this issue though. I wish you luck in getting the data back, but it's looking pretty grim at the moment though.

[Guntharia]

I did reinitalize it with Intel software and it did it very fast so I'm hoping it didn't write over the existing data. In the mean time I shut her down and have been calling some data recovery places. Thank you all for your input. Not to high jack my own thread but it is the best way to go about creating raid as opposed to the "fake raid" I created. Raid is a little bit new to me and I don't want to go through this again. I thought what I did would keep me somewhat safe but I need a better way to keep it safe if I have a bios failure again. Of course I still don't understand how the aquacomouter firmware even started this. If in use NAS raid will that not rely on bios? I obviously need some more knowledge on this subject. 

[Guntharia]

So after tinkering around for awhile I finally did a super scan with active partition recovery. After a couple of days of scanning these were my results. This has now turned into a question of what do I do next. In active partition recovery SuperScan log I see the "Signature Files List". I see a bunch of files there shown in the picture and the scan looked all green with no bad sectors. I see on their instructions they do not have Signature Files but rather a little hard drive icon. It looks like it has found all my information.

 

A. I need advice as I would like to try and recover back to the original hard drives the information is on? As there were no bad sectors shown I would think it would just make the files discoverable again if I'm lucky!?

 

B. Recover to an other pair of 6TB hard drives (which I do not have, I would need to buy). I would like to try option A first and if that doesn't work then option B. I don't want to overwrite or corrupt the data in option A. if it starts to rewrite the data to knew locations on the hard drives?