My RAID 5 Drives Are Not Being Recognized

Hello guys,

My Terramaster 5-bay enclosure has stopped working all of a sudden. I'm using Windows 10.

So I started removing the drives one by one and connecting them via SATA to my pc. Some of the drives show part of them as used, while others show 0 bytes are used. When I open the disk manager in Windows 10, it says I must initialize the drive.

I'm a little worried here. How can I diagnose this? I want to know if the issue is from the drives or the enclosure.
I think the issue is from the drives because I tried them on in another enclosure but they did not work.

Now, I'm taking them out one by one and running Partition Recovery on them through MiniTool. It takes forever to check each one.

So in the meantime, can anybody suggest anything that would help me diagnose the issue?

naif1992 said:

Hello guys,

My Terramaster 5-bay enclosure has stopped working all of a sudden. I'm using Windows 10.

So I started removing the drives one by one and connecting them via SATA to my pc. Some of the drives show part of them as used, while others show 0 bytes are used. When I open the disk manager in Windows 10, it says I must initialize the drive.

I'm a little worried here. How can I diagnose this? I want to know if the issue is from the drives or the enclosure.
I think the issue is from the drives because I tried them on in another enclosure but they did not work.

Now, I'm taking them out one by one and running Partition Recovery on them through MiniTool. It takes forever to check each one.

So in the meantime, can anybody suggest anything that would help me diagnose the issue?

Hi there
Don't do anything with individual drives in RAID arrays otherwise you'll break the whole system.

Things like partition magic won't help either --the whole point of RAID is that you need to check the array as a whole.

As Windows has no native RAID system I assume you must have some sort of RAID controller in the machine.

At the risk of sounding boring again a good way is to boot up a Linux live distro system from a usb stick --e.g fedora 31 or ubuntu and see if it recognizes the RAID system --otherwise go back to a version / backup of Windows you had when the RAID devices worked.

If more than 1 device is in trouble then you've got problems anyway. Even with RAID you should always have data backup so you can delete the array, reformat, rebuild the RAID system and restore from data backup -- decent cheap USB devices work brilliantly for this type of job.

RAID Level Comparison: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10 | Dataplugs

Cheers
jimbo

As @jimbo alluded to, taking the drives out of a RAID enclosure and writing to them individually via a Windows system has likely destroyed the data that was in the RAID array.

The individual disks in a RAID 5 array do not have a complete file system. They have only a part and that part is not in itself functional. To access the data you need all of the drives together. Putting the drives in a different enclosure will not work unless it has identical configuration.

RAID in it's various forms is useful but people often rush into it without understanding the implications and that often leads to unfortunate results. The most important thing to understand is it's purpose. No form of RAID ever devised is a viable backup solution. It's purpose is not to protect your data but to maintain access to it in the event of a drive failure. Big difference. Except RAID 0. It's purpose is to improve performance and provides no redundancy of any kind. A drive failure means loosing all data. To protect your data you need to maintain backups.

You need to determine if the problem is the drives or the controller. How you would do that depends on the controller. The controllers manufacturer would have this information. But at this time the data on the drives may have been damaged by the improper diagnostic procedures, even if they were not the original problem.