Fixing a split raid 5 array

Racer_600

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Joined
7 Apr 2005
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39
I have an Asus motherboard, M2N-E, with an onboard RAID controller, NVIDIA nForce 570 Ultra. I had 5 SATA drives plugged into slots 1 through 5 of the 6 possible plugs on the MB. I used those 5 drives in a RAID 5 setup and all has been good for 2 months. This morning windows Vista did a driver update and after rebooting, where it normally listed a single RAID 5 array as healthy it listed 2 RAID 5 arrays as broken. It seems that one of the new arrays is 2 disks and the other is 3 disks. Now I know that if it was 1 and 4 disk, I would delete the single and use it to rebuild the 4 disk set back to 5. But I do not know how to basically remerge those 2 arrays back into 1. I also know I could start from scratch but I don't want to loose the contents of what is currently stored. I put an IDE drive back in this machine running windows XP x64 that was loaded from before I got the new drives temporarily but I want the other contents back. I tried google, i tried the nvidia forum but I am not entirely sure what I am even looking for. Any help/tips/suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt
 
You're right, not much out there.

What little I could find implied that if 2 drives went down it is because the recovery from the first failure damaged the array. This happens if you have one of the drives designated as a hot spare that the controller automatically uses to fix a failed drive among the other 4. There was nothing about rebuilding from 3 healthy. It looks like it is not possible.

I'll keep looking.
 
Roll back the driver that was updated.
 
Steevo, I cant rollback the driver because vista was on that raid that is now broken and is inaccessible.
LeeJend, thanks for looking. I hope something can be done, as all 5 drives are good and should contain their data but are just not listed in the same array.
 
An update for anyone interested or later experiences similar problems. I contacted ASUS who said to delete one of the arrays from mediashield right after the bios screen and then rebuild the other. When I clicked to rebuild the larger set, the one that contained 3 disks, it let me add one of the 2 and then wanted to rebuild. I opted to tell it not to, deleted the other raid so I had no raids available. I then created a new array with the same specs I did the first time, down to same order for the disk. It then asked if I wanted to clear the disks, I said no, rebooted and under the XP I had on the extra IDE drive it saw all my files in the partitions that where there before.
The next steps are to backup as many of the files as I can, just incase and then try booting off it to get back into VISTA.
 

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