Deleted RAID-5 volume.

[yorkman]

Today I made the biggest computer mistake of my life. As a result I probably lost all my important data! Here's the story:

Using the Intel Rapid Storage Manager utility I created a RAID-5 volume, 128KB. It asked about whether I want to keep the data on one of the drives. I said yes. I think that was the drive that had all my important data.

The migration process was about 10% in. I then cancelled it because I changed my mind about using the drives for RAID-5. I then deleted the RAID-5 volume not knowing that my regular drive with all my data was actually part of that migration process.  As soon as I deleted the volumei I noticed my drive disappeared from Windows Explorer on my Win'7x64 pc.

Is it possible to recover the files from one of those drives? I already tried utilities like File Scavenger (with the RAID-5 option) and GetDataBackNTFS. While I could see some of the files, everything I tried to recover was corrupted (pics not viewable, etc.)

File Scavenger shows most of the files without a status while some have a "Good" status. The ones with the Good status I can open but unfortunately none of them are files I care for.

I then tried to recreate the RAID-5 volume using the exact same drives in the same order as they were originally selected in Intel Rapid Storage Manager, still using 128KB stripe size....no luck. Recovering the files with those programs gave me the same result. I deleted the raid-5 volume a 2nd time now.

What are my chances of recovering those files? Are they all corrupted because I'm not selecting them in the proper order? I'm pretty sure I know what order I created them in but the files are all corrupted anyway.

Anything else I can try? Please help, I'm desperate. This is years worth of data! I'm willing to make a donation to anyone that helps me recover the data, even if just most of it instead of all.

[Tom]

I'm not sure I understand what happened to that disk exactly, but it sounds like this will not end well. You can try an iRecover run, the trial allows analysis of the disk and that should give you an idea of what to expect.

[Joep]

Was the data you need back originally on ONE disk?