Intel raid 10 recovery help!

[MengNa]

I updated my motherboards (Asus P8P67 Deluxe) bios today, and it reset all the settings to default including the Sata controller. So I set it back to Raid mode and it said my Raid 10 array failed. In windows RST says that 2 drives are missing from the array.
I tried unplugging and replugging the 2 missing drives but it won't reconstruct it. I tried doing the recommendations from this thread http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...a-Recovery-101, but the Raid Reconstructor keeps coming up with "not significant" or something like that.
Now I'm trying this: http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-re...solution.shtml and hoping it helps.
Can anyone advise me what to do next? I have no other backup of most things on the array, and it'll be devestating if I can't recover it...

[MengNa]

Never mind, crisis averted!
I followed the other set of advice in the stickied thread that I also found elsewhere about resetting the drives to non-raid, recreating the array and using testdisk to rewrite the partition! I should have thought of that, as I did use testdisk before to rescue a partition I deleted accidentally, but I didn't know it works for raid arrays too.
Does anyone have any idea how to avoid the array being broken when updating the bios? I'm thinking of simply disconnecting all the array disks before flashing the MB and reconnecting them only after the bios is set back to raid... Although it's annoying to physically disconnect the drives in my rig...

[FUGGER]

You can use 2 drives to rebuild the raid.
Raid reconstructor needs to be out of RAID mode so it can access the drives. IDE or AHCI, both work.
It should be able to figure out what the stripe settings were and you should see data.

You can boot and use RST? is this a spare machine?

[FUGGER]

Cool

[MengNa]

It's just a data array. 4 x 2TB WD Green drives in raid 10 for all my stuff with redundancy and a bit of speed. Windows is on a separate boot drive that I'm about to upgrade to an SSD.
I didn't know that raid reconstructor can't work in raid mode though...
Thanks for the reply though! I nearly had a heart attack when this happened. My heart was beating so hard after using testdisk and rebooting that I thought it would explode! I'd go out and buy a couple more hard drives for external backup right now if it wasn't for the extremely inflated prices...

[trans am]

thats a scary situation to be in. If I were you I would get some ssds in raid(M4's) as your win/apps partition and use 2 of the greens in mirrored mode for your backups. You can run your 4 greens raid 0/1 but its not worth it. I've lost some valuable data this way I will never get back. just get some m4's in raid0 and mirror the data drives. maybe take the other 2 greens and raid0 those as a medium between your ssd set and your critical data set. you got it?

set A. ssd raid0 set B. 2 green raid0 set C. 2 greens in mirrored mode for redundancy.

[MengNa]

thats a scary situation to be in. If I were you I would get some ssds in raid(M4's) as your win/apps partition and use 2 of the greens in mirrored mode for your backups. You can run your 4 greens raid 0/1 but its not worth it. I've lost some valuable data this way I will never get back. just get some m4's in raid0 and mirror the data drives. maybe take the other 2 greens and raid0 those as a medium between your ssd set and your critical data set. you got it?

set A. ssd raid0 set B. 2 green raid0 set C. 2 greens in mirrored mode for redundancy.

I've got an Intel 320 300GB SSD coming for a boot+apps+games drive already. Personally I would rather not do raid 0 at all, even for the boot drive and with the better reliability of SSDs. Having lost some drives in the past before going to raid 1, I prefer not taking the risk.
I could do 2 separate raid 1 arrays with the greens, but I went with 0+1 for the extra speed boost and so far it's worked flawlessly. Now I just need to remember to do a full backup before updating the bios in the future

[trans am]

Im guessing this is your first venture with an ssd. as a single 300gb drive you will see probably the biggest noticeable performance increase since you started. But you will eventually want another ssd and a 300gb ssd is not cheap. You shouldve gone with a pair of 120gb or 2x 64 and raid0 them the rule is 2x120 if you only plan on raiding 2 drive and 64's if you want 2 or more. if you have ever experienced ssd's in raid0 you would be blown away. I have 4 x crucial 64gb m4's in raid0 on a lsi 9260-4i and it has broken several wr on hwbot. once you get a taste of that ssd speed you will only want more. once you feel the performance increase 1st hand you will wonder how you went this long without it. from and xs member to another its the most noticeable upgrade possible. forget a new video card or board or cpu. if you truly want to feel the performance it all starts with ssds then raiding them and then tweaking them then you start adding dedicated pcie raid cards. it becomes an obsession. You have no idea what you are in for. I'm kinda envious to be where you are again. it will probably be your most exciting chapter as a hardware enthusiast.

[MengNa]

While you do make it sound rather exhilarating, and I have been known to go overboard with computers (just recently built my first new rig in over 6 years and dropped around 7K on it), I think I'll settle for just 1 SSD at least for the next year or 2. The 300gb drive should do for that amount of time in terms of space, and my main use for the rig is gaming so the speed benefits over 1 SSD start getting negligible.
Maybe for my next upgrade when they finally get TRIM on raid I'll go that route.
Also, one obsession at a time is enough for me, and I'm already planning on expanding my water cooling on this rig, which I mainly got into because of XS