Many people don’t have a great impression of RAID drives, mainly due to the slight fragility of the product. Occurrences such as power failure or the crashing of an operating system can cause the drive to suddenly fail and start instilling panic in the owner of the drive. The truth however is that a RAID array is a much more reliable method of storing data as it keeps its own back-ups on striped or mirrored drives. If you get an error saying that your drive has “failed”, don’t panic – a “failed” error message when related to a RAID drive failure is rarely a hardware fault. It’s often just a matter of one or more of the drives becoming out of sync with one another.
No need to call the RAID data recovery specialists just yet. Thanks to a blog I found at Keyliner Thoughts, I was able to restore my drive and simplify their article for your reading pleasure right here. Follow the steps below to resolve the issue:
Rebuilding the array:
- The first thing you need to do is find the RAID icon in your system tray and open it for editing.
- Once the program is open, filter your way through the RAID hard drives and find out which drive has failed. Once you have identified the failed drive then you need to right click and select “mark as normal”. This will initiate the start of the RAID drive rebuild and the system tray should show the following message: “A RAID volume is being rebuilt. Data redundancy is being restored”. See the image below:
Initiating the RAID rebuild
- Guess what? That’s pretty much it. You can keep a watchful eye on the progress of the drive by right clicking on the yellow icon (as shown in the image) and selecting “show rebuild progress”. Feel free to continue working on your PC whilst this RAID drive recovery is in progress. You can continue to open files, open programs and play music etc. as usual. The only suggestion is that you don’t switch your PC off whilst the rebuild is in progress. The rebuild shouldn’t take too long depending on the size of the drive, as you can expect to wait about 90 minutes for 1 1TB RAID drive to rebuild.
If you have rebuilt your drive and continue to have RAID drive failure error messages, then it is possible that there is a slight hardware fault. If this is the case, it’s advisable to discontinue using the drive, contact a specialist RAID data recovery specialist and let them either fix the error or replace the faulty drive. They will also be able to perform a data recovery service so you can be assured you don’t risk losing any important information.
Good luck. I hope this article has been as helpful as it was for me and my RAID drive.
Related Posts
No related posts.