RAID10 Drives Offline

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JayKay4

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Jun 16, 2014
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How do I bring my drives in my RAID 10 Array back online? I am using an Intel ICH9 RAID 10 array which recently showed up as "offline" after a series of power fluctuations. My Win7 operating system is on a SSD and is not directly affected by the RAID drive.
 
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To use your solution, the OP needs 2 additional drives and he also has to know which drives have to be cloned. I've forced drives online before (usually RAID 5 and RAID 6) and never ran into issues other than a drive failing again. The OP's drives all are offilne; therefore setting them online again is somewhat low risk as far as I'm concerned. Besides if the OP's data was critical it would have been backed up on a regular basis.
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You don't. If you don't know EXACTLY why the RAID failed and that the RIGHT 2 drives are physically stable AND you don't have images made of the drives, you should NEVER attempt to force a failed RAID online to do a rebuild.
 
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No if you have the tools and make images of the drives first, then you just need 2 stable drives from the same subset to reconstruct the volume and backup your data. You can then identify which drives are failing/failed ad replace those, set up the raid again and migrate the data from the backup.
The problem is you've got a 50/50 chance that a second drive in the same stripe set is failing, at which point you'll need a professional data recovery lab to recover the data.
 
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Thank you for your attention to this problem TyrOd. I don't have an image backup and to make one, it would seem that I would need to get some drives online first. The array consists of four drives and all four are offline. Apparently, there is no easy solution to this problem other than a professional data recovery lab as you suggested. Thanks again for your help.
 
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You don't have to force the drives online attached to the current RAID controller. You can do it one at a time on any SATA to USB dock/cable as long as you've got the software.
 
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I'm confused as to what this accomplishes. If it is RAID10. the data is split between dives, and a single drive is unusable. The RAID software, or BIOS utility, should indicate which drive has failed. If the entire array is offline, it may just be that the controller got confused. If it does not come back after a power cycle, it loses nothing to bring it back online, in my opinion. If more than one drive has failed, it is probably all lost, anyway.
 
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The goal is to recover your data by imaging two drives with complementary stripe sets and then reconstructing the volume from that set. Nothing is lost forever until it is physically destroyed from the platters or overwritten.

If you've got a RAID10, that means that you two drives with one half of the data set and 2 drives with the other half. As long as you can get an image of 1 drive with the first half and 1 drive with the complementary half, you just need software to weave the sets together and you've got all the original data.
 
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To use your solution, the OP needs 2 additional drives and he also has to know which drives have to be cloned. I've forced drives online before (usually RAID 5 and RAID 6) and never ran into issues other than a drive failing again. The OP's drives all are offilne; therefore setting them online again is somewhat low risk as far as I'm concerned. Besides if the OP's data was critical it would have been backed up on a regular basis.
 
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Solution
Thanks to everyone for your comments and suggestions. I finally got in touch with my son, who is very knowledgeable on computers. I had told him that I knew which drive had first indicated problems. He told me to simply disconnect that drive and one additional drive. If that doesn't bring the array back on line reconnect that drive and disconnect a different drive. Continue drive by drive until the array comes back on line. He said the odds are that only one drive is bad, but the array goes off line because a single bad drive breaks the mirror. Taking the drive off line that is paired with the bad drive will leave the system with a RAID 0 array -- striped but not mirrored. I got lucky and found the drive paired with the bad drive on the first try. Now, all I have to do is make an image copy of the remaining striped array and then rebuild the RAID 10 array. I suspect the drives are all fine but some of the data got corrupted on the drive first indicated as degraded or bad, but that remains to be seen.
 
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To complete this solution, I did manage to produce a Ghost backup of the remaining stripe set. This left me free to see if I could bring the array back without having to do a rebuild and recover the backup. First I reinitialized the two drives I had disconnected using a USB 3 HD docking station. Then I reconnected the drives back into my desktop. The two drives showed up as online but nonmembers of the array. Interestingly, the Intel ICH9R ROM program allowed me to add a drive to the array, which it then recovered. Then it let me add the second drive, and it recovered it as well. Presto, I am back up and fully recovered. In the end, this was pretty painless.
 
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