Failed RAID 5, it only recognizes "Rebuild" status if failed drive is connected

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
S

skurvy_pirate

Honorable
May 14, 2012
7
0
10,510
So I have a really weird issue with my RAID 5 disk array (3 disks, uses MB built in Intel Rapid Storage). A week or 2 ago, one disk was marked as failed, but it was still working and the raid rebuilt using that disk. After the rebuild, the RAID was running SUPER slow with very high read latency. I used some tools to check the health of the disk to see what was going on and the one disk that was failed had some warnings in crystal disk info relating to reallocated, pending, and uncorrectable settings.

So obviously this disk is dying, and it was causing my whole RAID to run super slow. I wanted to backup some data off the RAID before my new drive got here for a rebuild, so I powered off the computer and unconnected the drive, thinking I could run in degraded mode. The problem is when I powered it back on the RAID showed as failed on the Intel Rapid storage screen. That was really surprising because both of the other disks were perfectly healthy. So I plugged back in the dying disk and it is recognized (very slowly, the Intel Rapid Storage screen takes a bit to show up when going to settings) and it then is marked as rebuilding.

So now I am afraid to let it actually rebuild since the disk is dying. I have a replacement drive but I can't use it because without the failing disk the RAID is marked as failed. Any idea on how this happened and what I can do to replace the bad disk with the new one and save my data?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes


The two other disks show as fine in the raid manager (in Windows) and also when I was checking with crystal disk info the other 2 drives looked perfectly healthy.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote


Thanks for the reply. What I am in the middle of doing now is imaging the 2 good drives and going to try and use R-studio or ReclaiMe to see if I can get that to work. If that fails, then I will image the dying disk and try again. I am just afraid to do anything with the dying disk unless I absolutely have to because whatever I do with it might be the last thing it ever does. Imaging it seems like the best bet though as it will preserve whatever state it is in and the image won't degrade further. Hopefully I don't need to do that and that if I do, it survives the imaging.

Hoping R-studio with the 2 disks will give some promise.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I was able to use ReclaiMe to reconstruct the RAID and see the files I care about. Something interesting though is my RAID had two volumes and only 1 is showing up. Luckily it is the important one, the other volume had replaceable stuff on it. Not sure why this is though.

Now I might try imaging the bad disk to the new hdd and see if the raid will rebuild properly since I know I have the files I card about.

BTW I followed the instructions here: https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/24731-recovering-data-from-a-failed-raid-5-on-desktop-pcs

Update: Looks like I can recover files from the missing volume too. R-Studio showed one partition and empty space. When I started scanning the empty space it started finding the missing volume files.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom