Taken hard drives out of raid, must initialize disk HELP!

[chaos1986]

I'm at a bit of a loss on this one, and last time i tried to recover the partitions and data on the drives I messed it up and winded up with 2 blank drives.

I had a raid setup (RAID 1, both exactly the same model, both 1TB) but decided it's not needed now I have a 256GB solid state drive.

I have a P6T6 workstation motherboard that has a built in Marvel raid controller with dedicated SATA raid ports on it that I was using.

Anyway I've put the hard-drives on normal functioning mode, but neither of them appeared on my computer, so i fire up Manager and get greeted by this...

What do i have to do to recover the drives?

 

[acer0169]

Click "OK" hehe :].

That's it.

You need to initialize the drives to let them run in normal operation, just as you would when you buy a brand new drive and chuck it in your computer. Initialize and do a quick format and you'll be laughing. 😀

 

[chaos1986]

That's the point, if i format the drives when i will loose ALL of my data, I don't want that

 

[Hawkeye22]

If setting the controller to "normal" mode doesn't allow windows to see the data then your only choice is to put it back in RAID mode, backup all the data, put the controller to "normal" mode, initialize & format the drives, then restore the data to them.

 

[sub mesa]

DO NOT CLICK INITIALIZE!

Doing so will overwrite/format/kill the data on the disks, which IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT.

Instead, burn an Ubuntu Linux livecd, boot from it and try to access your RAID contents using software RAID available in Ubuntu Linux. It should be ready immediately:
- click 'try ubuntu' so it won't install anything
- click the Places menu, click Home
- in the new window that opens, there is a left panel that may contain "... GB Filesystem" link you can click on. When doing so you should see your data appear on the right side of that window.
- if it works you can use the network to copy off data

This procedure won't work anymore if you click OK in the screenshot you posted. So think twice!

 

[chaos1986]

Dont worry i haven't clicked it lol

 

[acer0169]

I am sorry.. I didn't read that you wanted the data. I thought you just wanted the drives ready for use lol. I was VERY tired when posting my last reply. Anyway sub mesa is spot on, follow his instruction.

 

[1haplo]

Testdisk is a great file recovery program. And its FREE. It will rebuild the RAID so you can recover the data from the disks.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk