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I created a RAID-1 volume and the data is gone

BHous2
Beginner
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(Edited -originally confused Raid 0 with Raid-1)

 

I had a non-system Raid 1 volume (D:) that had lost a drive. Was running in Windows 10 in Non-Raid mode just fine. I downgraded from Windows 10 by installing Windows 7 from scratch. Changed BIOS (DP45SG) to RAID drive, installed the F6 driver, completed the updates and installed all the Intel Drivers for the DP45SG. I tried adding a new second D: drive and using the Rapid Storage Utility, I thought I could merge the two drives together keeping the contents of the old D: drive. I don't recall seeing any option to keep the old data, and so I took a chance. Now it says the Volume is created and it is empty!

 

I want to know if there is any way to reset the drive to recover the data. It shows up as unallocated in Disk Manager. The critical stuff is backed up, but I have a lot of photos and videos that are gone. I assume it is still there, but not currently reachable. I would really like to know if there is a way to reset the drive to non-raid and restore the data.

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Agit
Novice
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Raid 0 stripes the data across both drives. If you lose a drive in Raid 0 the entire virtual disk is toast. RAID 0 has no redundancy.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

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BHous2
Beginner
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You are absolutely correct. My mistake. I actually had a Raid 1 volume. Everything else is correct. I had two mirrored drives in a Raid 1 volume. and one died. Ran on the other drive. Downgraded to Windows 7, the single drive was fine. Tried to convert it to Raid 1 and ended up with an empty volume of two 2 TB drives. No striping.

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Agit
Novice
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To verify:

 

Initially you had a single disk NON-RAID volume when running Win 10.

You downgraded to Win 7, installed drivers, and setup RAID in the BIOS or RST (edit: Matrix Raid) Windows client.

You added a second disk to create a RAID 1 volume.

When the RAID 1 virtual disk was created all data got wiped.

 

Is this correct?

 

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BHous2
Beginner
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YES

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Agit
Novice
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OK, that's kind of what I thought. Unfortunately it sounds like what happened is that when you created the RAID 1 volume it initialized and wiped all of the data on the disks. This is pretty typical when creating a RAID volume, if the initial drive with data on it had been part of a RAID 1 volume it may have had enough metadata on it to trigger a rebuild when the 2nd disk was added. In this particular case it saw both disks as a new RAID 1 volume and wiped them.

 

There may still be a chance to recover the data, but I can't make any recommendations on which path to take to do that. I hope this helped to explain what happened, if it makes you feel any better I lost 3 HDD's in the last 1.5 years with a ton of data I never backed up through hardware failures (Avoid consumer level Seagate drives like the plague).

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