Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Hi,

I'm trying to recover a thunderbolt RAID 5 (4 x Drives), all drives are healthy.. 2 drives appearing as JBOD and the other 2 won't mount.. but all 4 appear in the RAID utility as being healthy.. so how can I recover the raid if I can only see 2 drives?

Thanks in advance,

You need to remove the drives from the array and connect them independently to the computer. You can't work through a RAID card or enclosure. The software must be able to access each drive individually.

What was the original config? A single RAID 5 of all 4 disks? What happened right before it went down on you?

Thanks for the advice.. yes it’s a Raid 5 of all 4 drives.. nothing out of the ordinary happened.. I started my day as normal.. powered up my Mac went to make a coffee came back and noticed that the Raid drive wasn’t mounting..

So it's likely that the array just went stupid and corrupted the metadata(where it keeps track of how the array is configured). Probably it thinks some drives are offline, or maybe you really do have one or two that are unstable.

The safest course of action is to clone all four drives onto other drives (or to image files) so you're sure you're working with healthy hardware. After that R-Studio can probably autodetect the RAID parameters. Just note that if you do have a failed drive or one that's been offline for some time autodetect might not work correctly and some manual configuring will probably be necessary.