Maximum PC

Significant computer parts:
- Lanboy Air (with suspending HDDs)
- 3 x 3TB Hitachi HDDs in RAID 5

After packing my computer and travelling with it in my car for 3 hours, I set it up at my apartment in college and I'm greeted with my wonderful 6TB array being marked as unallocated. Before I left I did do a proper shut down and I packed my computer in the original case box with the foam padding. But I was playing fairly loud music with lots of heavy bass for almost the whole trip. I don't know if this has any affect on HDDs but its worth noting. This is my second time travelling with my computer and nothing was wrong the first time. When I start up disk management it asks me if I want to initialize disk 1 and obviously I press cancel because I had at least 2TB of data on there!! I really don't want to lose all this data.

It doesn't seem like the drives have failed because on the RAID screen during POST it says it is functional and in disk management it recognizes the size of the array. I have also checked the connections in case something came lose during travelling and it all seems fine.

Please help me D;

Since it asks for me to initialize the disk, maybe it somehow lost its mbr. To fix this I believe I use my windows disk, enter repair, and use the fixmbr command. But what is the exact command to type? I'm not too sure.

Print it out and follow instructions...you didn't say what system, so I assumed win 7.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

Nasty

Unless your subs can vibrate at ultra low frequencies with high intensity that ripps metal apart with the force of 350-1000g's (sound waves that could rip a man apart mind you), you shouldn't have anything to worry about. The one thing you do have to make sure is if any connections or cables shifted during transport.

Funny enough, I did discover that my SLI bridge would shift or vibrate loose every so often only because my system is 2ft away from a 10" 500w sub.

Yes I do have Windows 7, sry I forgot to mention it. I tried to follow the directions but the commands weren't being recognized.

My speakers aren't powerful enough to rip metal apart, but I do know that the brand of them is C4 and they are 2 12" subs that take up half my truck space in my Mazda 3.

I checked all my SATA cables again by pulling them all out and putting them back in, in the same ports they were in before and nothing changed. Plus they all have the clip on them so its unlikely they did come out. I checked any other wires too and everything looks fine.

I found this program called Test Disk that seems to be able to fix the array, but I'm having some trouble on what its saying. I'm going to post some screen shots later and link them to here soon.

Here I've uploaded some screenshots of testdisk to photobucket so you guys can understand more clearly: http://s1057.photobucket.com/albums/t38 ... 0RAID%205/

One other way is to do a quick partition (that doesn't over-write the existing free space) and then use a restoring program to get the data back.

What do you think?

I don't think formatting the partition will help in any way getting the data back. Have you tried to run Recurva on that array?

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Nasty

I tried using Recuva, but it only finds things on my C drive and not my other drive.
When I was talking about formatting this is what I meant, quoted from Recuva's feature list,
"Similarly, when you format a drive (especially if you use the Quick Format option), Windows erases the hidden index but does not overwrite the existing files until you start saving new data to it. Recuva can still scan the drive's contents to find your files."
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/features ... tted-disks

Recurva is used in case you formatted over a drive and need to get the data back. If Recurva can't see the drive I think you are out of luck unless you send it to a recovery service and that is very expensive.

Nasty

Now I'm testing out Recover My Drive. I found a forum where it sounded like someone had the exact problem as mine and this program fixed their problem.

And also I did run the HD Tune error scan and it did not find any errors on the RAID 5 disk array.

One more thing is that EaseUS Partition Master Professional 9.1 is available on Giveaway of the Day today and it looks like they have their own form on recovery too.

I have good news, I FIXED IT!!

So here's my story:
I was using the Recovery My Drive program and it took about 9 hours to scan all 2 billion blocks on that disk. It found all the files on my lost disk, but when I tried to recover them I found out that it was a paid feature, which cost $70. Damn... So I started looking at other solutions and decided to give that new program I downloaded a try. I pressed "Partition Recovery" with the long scan button. It found all the files on the drive almost instantly. It was a little buggy to get the proceed button to work, but once I got it, the recovery screen was there for only 20 seconds before it finished. And now I can access all my files through Windows Explorer.

One weird thing to note is that there is an unallocated space of 129MB in front of my 5.46TB. I don't remember that being there before.

Lesson learned: Use Giveaway of the Day. They might have exactly what you need.
And I need to improve my backup system....