Thanks for everyone who contributed. Too many to give credit for these steps but here is my take with other steps I took:
My setup is a raid 10 with 4 disks. The problem started when my computer suddenly stopped working (after years of service). Lot of troubleshooting followed and the problem was the motherboard, it was death. The raid card was on board and that's the main problem - if the motherboard fails the raid card is gone. No need to say that with on-board raid cards there's a greater risk of failure due to the fact that if the mb fails for whatever reason your raid card is gone too.
After lot of research I found out that if I replace my death mb with the same exact model, or at least one with the same raid card I should be able to just replace the motherboard, hook the raid disks exactly as in the old mb, and the raid will work by itself.
The first problem was that the mb was pretty old and no longer being sold new, so I had to pay a good penny to find a refurbished one. (It was more than double the price when I bought it new)
After the mb arrived, I replace the old with the new, crossed my fingers and it booted. Forgot to mention that the OS was installed on a separate ssd disk (not the raid array) which made things simpler.
The system booted and suddenly I saw the "2 non Member Disks", apparently in the bios the disks were not set to raid the first time it booted which caused 2 disk to fall out of the raid or something.
When windows started I could see 2 disks are in the raid and the 2 others were not. At this point you should not initialize the disks, format or do anything to the raid array or disks!
Its important also to stop the service of the Intel Raid/Intel Rapid storage or delete it altogether from windows because it could interfere with the process or try to initialize the wrong raid automatically etc.
Anyhow, more days spent doing research and before trying anything further suggested here, one should ideally first do the below:
Physically clone the disks to other disks
And attempt the recovery procedure on the "CLONED DISKS" (its important to hook the cloned disks in the same order as the ones being cloned - labels are a must) - I didn't had the option to buy 4 new disks but if you have the means, and most importantly If you don't have a backup, buying 4 disks to reduce the risk of loosing your data is a fair price.
Make an image of all the disks.
I used "Reclaim Me Free Raid Recovery" (FREE software) and after a few days I had 4 .img disks.
Obviously the .img disks need a lot of space so you could buy an external drive with lot of capacity for this.
I read that you could recover/reconstruct the said RAID Array using the .img disks but didn't managed to do so personally.
BUT the nice twist to recover the raid suddenly came to my mind when I used "Reclaim Me File Recovery" which is demo software by the same company as "Reclaim Me Free Raid Recovery"
I run the demo software and it could locate my data (but to recover data you need the full version which is not free). I tried the demo on the 4 disks and the software was returning the same data on 2 disks, and the same data on the other 2 disks. Yes! thats the nature of RAID 10, meaning the same data is on 2 of the disks!
So technically one could recover the data using 2 disks only (depending which disks, basically those with the different data).
The next step was to load the .img of the 2 disks with different data using "Reclaim Me Free Raid Recovery" (FREE software) and then use the "Start Raid 5" Recovery option.
And just like that, after a while it found the data.
The option i used next was the "Write Array to Disk"
It took 4 days and then it recovered the Disk Array (All the data) for free using the 2 .img disks as a raid 5.
Notes:
Be sure to have enough space to store the recovered Raid Array (and all the files)
I tried the above procedure to recover the Raid10 array using the 4 .img disk but that one failed, hence why i tried the Raid 5 option (which apparently is much more simpler for the software to recover)
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Now, after the data was recovered from the .img disks, had a copy of the .img disk still and/or have physical clones of the disks I could try the technique mentioned in this thread without worrying too much if it failed (because I already had my data recovered), as per below:
- Booted into windows and uninstalled Intel Matrix / Intel Rapid Storage software or stop the service. (If not done already)
- Rebooted, Entered raid setup and took note of the name of the Raid Array (take a photo just in case)
- While still in the raid setup, set the 2 disks which were still in the raid array to non-raid (no delete).. so the non-raid disk are now 4.
- Created a new raid array using the 4 disks and with the same name of the array as before.(basically an identical raid like the old one with the same settings, mine were the default)
- Booted into windows and used TestDisk to analyze.
- Quick Search with Testdisk returned no readable files.
- Deeper search revealed the original RAID 10 partition.
- RAID 10 partition showed correct files and wrote partition data to disk using Testdisk.
- Rebooted
- Raid Array RECOVERED!
Note again that my OS was on a separate hard disk and not on the raid. Its very important not to do anything to the raid disks or you risk loosing the data, no need to say that you shouldn't do anything such as initializing, formatting, etc.
As always the steps come without any guarantee and try them at your own risk!
