Accidentally disconnected 2 hard-drives on a 4-drive RAID5.

[idata]

I have a 4-drive RAID5 on a D975XBX board. This is my boot volume. The 4th drive failed and I accidentally disconnected the 3rd drive. When I saw my error, I reconnected the 3rd drive and disconnected the 4th. However, now the 3rd drive is shown as 'Unknown Disc' and the array is 'Failed'. I know the 3rd disk is fine... but the array no longer recognizes it. At this point I'm just trying to recover my data... I know I have 3 good drives with data (and 1 failed; which is recoverable for RAID5). Can anyone please offer any suggestions?

[idata]

I see that there is a potential workaround here: http://communities.intel.com/thread/3351?start=15&tstart=0

Can anyone please provide any suggestions for using TestDisk in this situation?

[idata]

Your real mistake was after you reconnected the wrong drive and disconnected the right drive without first rebooting then you should of powered down and disconnected the right drive, Plus did you power down before disconnecting any drives?

Have you tried reconnecting all the drives back up?

Install an OS on another drive and use this Freeware Raid Reader to get the files off.

http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-to-raid/ http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-to-raid/

If that does not work get RAID Reconstructor.

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

[idata]

I didn't do any 'hot swaps'. I turned off the computer and unplugged drive 3 of 4 (failed one was 4 of 4). When I powered up, I saw in the bios/options screen that Disk 3 of the array was now shown as 'Failed' and there was no disk 4. I powered down and reconnected disk 3 where it was and disconnected disk 4. I expected to see 3 good disks and a missing/failed 4th disk. However, I now saw an 'Unknown' disk in slot 3 -- it wasn't able to recognize that disk as its old 'good' disk 3... and hasn't since.