Another RAID 5 fails?

[Einar]

i have googled the web but could not come up with any answers. I have a windows softwareraid "5" (yes plz hate me for this) with 3x3TB disks, one disk recensently failed. I have just replaced the bad disk with a new one. But i have still no way to add the new disk to the "old" raid, and the bad drive is still listing as missing.

I have tried converting the new disk to mbr, gpt, dynamic and basic. No luck there to get more options..

My raid contanes loooooots of movies and tvshow and so on, so it not that important. But i would like to know if all is completly lost or recovery able?

Here is a img of the disk management. Disk 0 and 1 is the old working disk in the raid, yes dey hare SMART cheked. Disk 2 is the new replacement. Disk 4 is my other raid witch ofc is real hardware raided...

http://i.imgur.com/sitcQ8R.jpg

I will be super happy for any response

 

[ussnorway]

My first instinct is that the software will be totally corrupt but you could try running it through one of the free DE-formatter programs… professional recovery software is expensive and movies are notoriously hard to fix so don't get your hopes up.

p.s. live long and prosper, captain Kirk!

 

[Trouble]

It has been a while since I fooled around with software raid and dynamic disks but I suspect the problem you are having is because Disk 2 has been formatted and has and NTFS partition (Drive E ). Even though it is empty (100% free space) you may have to delete the volume so it shows as unallocated then perhaps you may be able to reactivate the volume you should be prompted then on which disk to include with 0 and 1.
Mostly guess work on my part, as I've said, it has been a while.

 

[Einar]

Thanks for the answers.
I have tried a lots of things. I have tried all of the compbinations for unallocaded and ntsf ( mbr, gtp, dynamic, basic).
When i try to reactivate i get the error message: The selected volume is offline. I have tried setting it to online, even that should not be possible. At the moment im using UFS explorer raid recovery (free) to back up the 2 remaining disks. It stores the backups as .img files. If its not possible to recover the raid, can i use does .img files to recover some of the lost data, when i have deleted the volume and sat the raid back together? Im getting 2 .img files of the 2 remaining disks.

 

[ussnorway]

snip...
If its not possible to recover the raid, can i use does .img files to recover some of the lost data.

Yes, well maybe… You would need software that doesn't insist on scanning the complete drive before it will work which rules out Windows. I have used Ubuntu to recover files from damaged hardware in the past and would transfer the remain hard-drives (are they virtual or physical?) to a Ubuntu install before going any more along with raid… this will at least show you what perhaps can be recovered.

If you want to spend the time extracting these files and they can be seen by Ubuntu then don't be tempted into large copy and paste jobs but only transfer them one at a time… in the long run this is the quicker way.