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A friend, who is not tech savvy had a hardware RAID of two disks. That means he had either RAID 0 or RAID 1.

All of a sudden, the RAID disk disappeared from his windows, wasn't listed in Computer Management and during boot the hardware RAID card was reporting any disks.

I have a SATA dock (USB) and i used it to test the drives. I tried in windows and mac but in both cases the drives wouldn't show up even as devices.

Is this check i did correct? if the drives are not listed during booting or in the OS as device i assume their controllers must be fried.

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2 Answers

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If it were RAID 0, and he lost a disk, he would not be functioning at all.

With hardware RAID, the RAID controller presents the disks to Windows as whatever the configuration on the RAID controller is, so for RAID 1, that is still only one volume (despite it really being mirrored disks), so Windows only sees it as one disk.

If you really have questions about its health, you need to boot into the RAID controller as the computer is starting (on servers there are often applications that let you check health while running, but not sure about most home systems).

Be careful just to look, and not change any settings unless you are 100% sure of what you are doing...making a wrong decision can cost you his data.

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If i hook the two HDDs directly in the motherboard and check if are appearing in the BIOS as devices that should be enough to check their health? – a4ex Jul 11 '11 at 11:22
I would say that is not enough to check. Use the Ultimate boot cd and run a disk check. ultimatebootcd.com Did you attempt to check the health of the RAID volume in the RAID controller's BIOS? That really should tell you. – KCotreau Jul 11 '11 at 11:44
No i haven't tried through the controller's BIOS. I only checked as sigle drives in BIOS or in windows and mac enviroment. – a4ex Jul 11 '11 at 11:57
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Check if you can see the drives in BIOS, if you can't and they are properly connected they are probably fried.

Then check if you have any RAID-controller setup which boots after the BIOS. If you have that, try to get in there. Then you can see what type of array it was (RAID0/RAID1), and you can probably check health status.

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