Raid 5 Volume, 1 drive went bad. While degraded, another failed temporarily. Volume is not accessible now.

[MR10]

Hello,

I have a RAID 5 setup with 4 3TB drives installed.

Running Win 8.1, 64 bit. Intel Rapid Storage Technology 13.1.0.1058.

A few days ago, one of the drives started failing. I initiated an RMA return right away and am awaiting the replacement. I had tried my best to keep my PC usage minimal while in degraded status, but tonight another drive dropped out, only temporarily. It appears online now but the volume is in a failed status and I cannot access it at all.

What is the recommended approach to try to recover this as safely as possible?

Currently I have 3 of 4 drives operable. The 4th is toast and not accessible in the least. It's replacement should be here in a few days. One of the 3 remaining drive is questionable since it failed today, but is online for now.

Should I wait until the replacement for the toasted drive arrives and hope Intel Rapid Storage initiates a rebuild successfully? Or will it not initiate since the volume is showing as failed?

Or, before installing the replacement drive, should I try to recover the failed volume by some other means. ie, I read deleting it and creating a new one with same settings may recover the volume and did have a scenario years back where I had to do that and was successful. However, this scenario is a bit different since I only currently have 3 of the 4 drives functional at the moment, so would trying to recover the volume now cause issues since the volume is still going to be degraded?

This is the thread that bailed me out of my previous scenario where the volume was deleted and able to be recovered through testdisk. I am just concerned about how to handle it with only 3 of 4 working drives.

I'd just like to tread as carefully as possible. I would think all my data is still out there since I have 3 of 4 drives currently functional. I just am worried about taking the right steps and in the right order to be as safe as possible here.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Thanks for joining the Chipset community.

I understand you are currently setup RAID 5 with 4 hard drives and the RAID status indicates "failed".

I regret to inform you that once RAID volume shows as failed; it will not initialize or recover the structure.

You can try to reset disk to Non-RAID and try to recover data but I cannot guarantee data is still intact.

Allan.