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trusnock

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Need help recovering Windows 7 software RAID10

Hello,
I have four WD Caviar Black 750GB drives in RAID10 (software RAID in Windows 7 Pro) for 1.5TB of storage for my BeyondTV DVR.  It worked great for many months, but we shut it down to move it temporarily, and when I turned it back on a few days later the RAID array is gone.

The OS is on a separate drive, so the PC works fine, but my video files are inaccessible.  

Windows still sees the four drives, but they are reported in Disk Management as follows:

Disk 0 - Basic - Online - (F:) 698.64 GB RAW - Healthy (Primary Partition)
Disk 1 - Basic - Online  - (no drive letter) 698.64 GB - Unallocated
Disk 2 - Basic - Online - (no drive letter) 698.64 GB - (no status listed)
Disk 3 - Unknown - Not Initialized  - (no drive letter) 698.64 GB - Unallocated

I looked at the drives with TestDisk, specifying an Intel/PC partition type:

Disk 0:
Disk /dev/sda - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91201 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
 1 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 182401 198  5 2930282496
 1 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 182401 198  5 2930282496
No partition is bootable


Disk 1:
Disk /dev/sdb - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91202 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

No partition is bootable


Disk 2:
Disk /dev/sdc - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91201 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
 1 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 182401 198  5 2930282496
 1 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 182401 198  5 2930282496
No partition is bootable


Disk 3:
Disk /dev/sdd - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91201 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

Partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55


I don't have any reason to suspect multiple drive failures or a virus.  It's possible Windows didn't get shut down properly (somebody else powered it off before we moved it).  So I'm hoping this is a relatively simple corruption of the RAID signature.

Unfortunately I don't have a system state backup, but the C: drive is Ok and the computer is bootable, so if Windows stores the RAID config info somewhere other than on the RAID drives, I might be able to get my hands on it.

Can anyone tell me where to go from here?  I don't want to just "try things" for fear of making it worse.

Thanks,
-Tom

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Rartemass
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Perhaps it is as simple as using system restore to select a restore point for windows OS prior to the move.  You did say it was windows software raid, so this should put windows back in that correct state to see the raided drive. It will do nothing to the other drives, but will tell Windows how to treat the drives - as an array.
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trusnock

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Boilermaker85: For some reason, the only restore point is from 3 days ago (even when I click "show more restore points"), which is three days after I suspect the array went away.  I'm not SURE when the array went away, so I tried it anyway, but it didn't help.

Rartemass: According to their website, Runtime's Raid Recovery only supports RAID0 and RAID5, and I have a RAID10.  Since RAID10 is actually a mirror of two stripe sets, I'm trying it now on just the first two drives as RAID0.  So far it looks very promising, showing me all the files from the array.  I'll let you know after I spend $99 whether it worked.
Raid 10 (or raid 1+0) is a raid 0 that is mirrored (raid 1).
So something that can recover raid 0 will help with raid10.
Glad its looking promising for you.
How you build the RAID10?  By from the Intel chipset or other software or hardware?
This is very important,  because all Raid recovey need to know the exact build method. This is the key point to recover your raid. Software tool to recover the raid only work on  the raid which using the same method built.  
By the way, system restore cannot save the disk problem.

Runtime software's "RAID Recovery for Windows" found the files and let me save them successfully to a USB drive.

Although my array was a RAID10 and the software only supports RAID5 and RAID0, I was able to use the RAID0 option (since a RAID10 is really a RAID1 array made of two RAID0 arrays), and simply point it at the first two drives.

I was hoping for something that could actually REPAIR the array and make it usable again, but this is the next best thing and I got all of my files back.

Thanks for your help!
-Tom