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My motherboard is an MSI Big bang xpower with a RAID 5 running Windows 7. The ICH10R on the motherboard controls the RAID. Recently a power interruption occurred and the RAID was not able to complete a verify operation - instead of completing, the verify stopped at 77%. Then a drive reported a smart event. I removed the drive with the smart event to analyze it in another computer. When I replaced the single smart event drive into the original computer and restarted that computer, the RAID 5 array failed completely.

The ICH10R in band raid utility says I still have three good drives, so why has the RAID array failed? I can't seem to make the setup recognize the failed drive to reset the smart event either. My most recent backup is three weeks old, and it would be nice to recover the volume if possible. Any ideas why the RAID has failed with 3 of 4 good disks?

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possible duplicate of Why won't the motherboard RAID verify operation complete? – sblair Sep 20 '11 at 1:41
I had the exact same problem with my Intel RAID controller. 5x2TB and one "died" (mysteriously - it's still good if you plug it in to another board). My solution was to use R-Studio to build a virtual RAID5 volume and suck the data off it. Just bear in mind that Intel's parity is left synchronous (or something like that) - not the default parity calculation in R-Studio. You have to change it. – ta.speot.is Sep 20 '11 at 2:18
Ok, I will probably try to recover the data using a software utility. Searching superuser and serverfault, I find lots of people recommending Spinrite. Prices seem similar to R-Studio. Any data recovery product recommendations knowing this is a raid-specific problem? – steampowered Sep 20 '11 at 12:48
+1 todda.speot.is for recommending R-Studio (and for making me feel better about my situation - good to know this has happened to others). R-Studio recovered all the files for $80 and a couple hours of my time. My first attempted data recovery - a success! If you post your comment as an answer I'll mark it as the answer. – steampowered Sep 22 '11 at 15:32
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