I have a RAID 5 setup with 5 drives using the Intel ICH10R chipset. When I flashed my BIOS recently, it reset its settings to their defaults. When it restarted, it rebooted into Windows before I could change the BIOS settings back to the proper RAID configuration. After setting the BIOS settings back to RAID and rebooting, the RAID array failed. One of the drives was detected as a non-RAID drive. The partition for the RAID volume was inaccessible and Windows Disk Management detected it as type RAW. How can I repair my RAID array? Thank you for your help.
Raw would suggest that good ol windows has porked it during that first boot i'd guess - although have had very little experience with Raid array's. Is there data on there that is mission critical or are you just hoping to get the whole system working again?
I have a backup of most of the data. But it is off-site and out of the state. So recovering the data from the RAID would be a much quicker and complete job.
Well if the drive is now in a 'raw' state you are going to need to get it out and into another machine ideally and run some data recovery software on it - this may not be possible with the drive in 'raw' and may require a quick format to NTFS - just make sure you don't do a full format if that is the case.
When you're going to implement RAID in the future, configure it from inside Windows. Convert all the drives to Dynamic Disks (volumes), and set RAID5 from there. For now you'll need to recover your RAID setup. There's a program, called RAID Reconstructor. It can reconstruct a failed RAID setup. Install the Trial version and see if it can repair your RAID 5
Solved! In case anyone's interested. This thread traces the steps I went through to fix my problem: RAID 5 recovery - Tech Support Forum.
