See "Hardware RAID" in Chapter 13 to determine whether the RAID is hardware- or software-based.

Do You Need to Read This Chapter?

First determine if the RAID hardware mechanism is still working. Data can be lost due to an event unrelated to the RAID mechanism, such as in the following cases:

• Files are lost by virus attacks or accidental deletion.
• Volumes are deleted, resized, reformatted or otherwise changed in Windows Disk Manager.

In such cases you can follow procedures for ordinary (i.e. non-RAID) drives discussed throughout this manual.

The procedures in this chapter are for a failed hardware RAID that is no longer accessible in Windows, such as in the following cases:

• The RAID controller has failed and/or has been replaced and the original logical volumes are lost.
• One or more disks have physically failed.
• The disks have been physically moved within the controller. For example, the cables connecting two disks may have been accidentally swapped.
• The RAID configuration has been changed in the RAID BIOS or a vendor-supplied configuration program.

Making this distinction is important to avoid wasting time and possibly money following RAID recovery procedures when the RAID has not failed.