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Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 4:21 pm**

Reload the wife's computer. I had all her pictures backed up up to the server, so good to go.

A day later the server crashes. Coincidentally, the server power button picks that moment to dislodge itself from the power button housing, so I take the front of the case apart so I can fish the dangly wires out and push the power button manually. Power on but no boot. I remove the server from the server closet to my work bench so I can hook a monitor up to it to see what's going on.

Says the windows boot file is corrupt. Fine. I put in the disk and attempt to repair... no go.

POST says RAID array is healthy but BIOS can't see the boot drive. Uh oh. Well fortunately all the important files and shit are backed up on the D drive, which is the single drive not in RAID. I pull the D drive and hook it up to my gaming PC so I can do a quick copy, just to have a backup.

Gaming PC power button has apparently just become dislodged from the power button housing. What the fuck.

I open the case and push the power button on the mobo. Boots up, I check the D drive.... no pictures. What? Oh fuck.... when I moved them to that other folder a while back, that must have been on the C drive and I didn't realize it. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck..... and the wife's computer with the first copy of pictures just got wiped... fuck... and I pulled my backup external drive, and the last time I backed up pictures was April.... fuck.... and I thought the single drive was the C drive, and the duals were the RAID 0 D drives... fuck.... which means it looks like one of the drives just died and I lost her pictures, which are very important to her.

Fuck.

Just threw in an old hard drive on the server, made it Master, and am loading an OS onto it to see if I can see the raid array at all. Not hopeful.

Three copies of the damned picture folder and two are gone and the 3rd is out of date. Christ.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 5:32 pm**

I had a week like this a few months ago, so I feel your pain.

Everything I have that is important now lives on at least three places, one of which is the cloud.

I offer free remote backup to my raid 5 array if you are interested using crash plan. Also crash plan does free computer to computer backups to avoid all that thinking-about-it crap.

My array has 14 TB free currently, so can back up plenty. In case of crash, I can ship you a drive of the backup, or you can restore over the internet (I have a 5 Mbps up conection)

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 5:41 pm**

Yeah, I will look into adding automatic cloud storage to the mix once I get everything back up and running.

Going to Florida on Wednesday and I'm not going to have time to build the new hardware til we get back.

Edited By GORDON on 1410644524

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 5:58 pm**

one of which is the cloud.

Catt's nudies are going to be part of the second batch of celeb ones.

And yeah, your situation sucks Gordo.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:02 pm**

Fuuuuuuuuuck.

It wasn't a bad drive, one of the 2 SATA controllers on the mobo went bad. When I plugged the 2 drives into the other SATA ports BAM now BIOS can see them.

But I had to unRAID the drives in order to figure this out.

So I prolly lost the pics anyway.

Rebooting now.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:03 pm**

Except windows still can't see the newly-RAIDed drive. Hmmm.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:17 pm**

You lost all the pictures?

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 6:32 pm**

Everything since May 2014. Earlier than that I had another layer of backups.

I seem to have some sort of cascading failure...

I have 4 SATA ports, A0 and A1, B0 and B1. BIOS was able to see all 4. I had RAID 0 drives plugged in to A0 and A1.

Then I moved the drives from A0, A1 to B0, B1. BIOS could see them and I RAIDed them back up and this was progress. Rebooted... windows can't see them.

Rebooted. Now BIOS can see A0 and A1, says there is nothing on them (correct), but isn't listing B0 and B1 at all, empty or otherwise.

I double checked all BIOS settings were correct, activated all SATA ports in the RAID settings, rebooted.... now BIOS isn't seeing ANY SATA ports at all. Like they don't exist.

I set everything to default.... it's still like SATA doesn't exist.

I think the next step will be moving these drives to my gaming PC, setting up another RAID array (I already have one on there), and see if I can get them showing up so I can see if any data is recoverable.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:02 pm**

Definitely don't wipe any more hard drives until you know for sure what's wrong.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:24 pm**

Might be a fucked RAID controller. I disable RAID on bios and now everything shows up, just not in a raid array.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:28 pm**

I'm starting to think it might be easier to just cut the losses and buy one of those $500 unbranded HP's cake linked and call it the new server.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:45 pm**

Giving up on the "server." No matter what I do I can't see either drive in windows. I'll try to see them on another machine.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:26 pm**

I'm not getting this.

Put the drives on my gaming PC.

BIOS sees them.

Win7 installed drivers for the new hardware.

Windows explorer cannot see them. Even if they were brand new unformatted drives they should appear, right? Maybe both of them fried at the same time.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:34 pm**

When in doubt, google it.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:36 pm**

You have to go to Right-click My computer | Manage | Disk Management

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:39 pm**

TheCatt wrote:You have to go to Right-click My computer | Manage | Disk Management

I have no memory of ever doing that before, but that worked. I can see the volume.

It wants me to format it. Ugh.

I wonder if I can do a file recovery on it anyway. No idea how volatile striping is, if unmounting it offsets everything.

Edited By GORDON on 1410655222

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:59 pm**

Try bringing up the recovery tool first, and see if it can acknowledge the drive.

At this point, if you want to recover the data, or try... don't format.

Edited By TheCatt on 1410656434

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 9:03 pm**

I used Recuva in the past.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 9:06 pm**

Worst case scenario, you can send it to Ontrack.

Also, your wife posts LOTS of pictures, so she'll have copies of all those on FB.

Posted: **Sat Sep 13, 2014 9:08 pm**

Working with ReclaiMe at the moment... it claims it can recover RAID 0 with software as long as the drives aren't damaged.

Analyzed my disks, said it had high confidence that it had recovered the drive, and I told it to write the broken volume to the only other volume I had available... my C drive. I launched it, and waited to get the window where I could assign a target file.... but it said 0.1% complete.... 0.2% complete....

It was overwriting my C drive.

I killed it at 0.5% complete, but that was enough to wipe out my boot sectors and just now I had to run "Repair windows" from my install disk.

Ugh.

Now trying to figure out how to pull a spare 300GB drive out of my ass.

Welcome to Thunderdome

I've had a hilarious week of computer problems