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The drive was used inside a CR-H212 external RAID enclosure. The drives were working fine until I did the following:

  • Safely removed (in Windows) and fully unplugged
  • Opened and removed the two drives
  • Switched enclosure to normal mode
  • Put in a different drive and plugged in to see its contents (it was fine)
  • Safely removed (in Windows) and fully unplugged
  • Switched enclosure back to RAID 1 mode
  • Put the original two drives back in
  • When plugged in, now shows as not initialized

After checking the manual again, it does warn about switching modes... I totally forgot! I'm guessing when you switch the mode back to RAID 1, the enclosure thinks you're starting a new array regardless of what is already on the drives. What it writes to disk to get things started I don't know. I know it didn't completely wipe the drives since the lights only blinked a few times and then stopped. In theory the data is still there.

I took the drives out again and connected one directly to SATA in my Linux machine and am dd-ing it to a backup file.

I do have a third drive that I rotated out of the array a while ago and I can access the (outdated) data just fine outside the array. The other drives show as "not initialized" whether they are in the array or not. I tried comparing partition info between the third drive and the not initialized ones (using testdisk) and they seem to be the same (which I guess makes sense) but which data specifies being initialized or not? What else can I compare with and what should I look for?

I was thinking of initializing the array and formatting it to what it was before (NTFS) and then copying the raw data from the backup to the array, but I don't know if that will do the trick. Would I need to copy data from/to a certain offset?

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  • If it's a RAID-1 the disks are represented as a logical drive to the system? In that case I'd expect the enclosure to have a problem to recognize the disks. Did you try to switch their places?
    – Seth
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 6:13
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    I'm pretty sure I put them back in the same positions, but was too afraid to try swapping and potentially making matters worse. Can't try right now even if I wanted to since dd is taking its sweet time (I kept the block size at 512 out of paranoia...). But the order might not matter anyway since you can seemingly replace either drive in-place in this enclosure. I added some info to the question.
    – user720288
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 18:11
  • It looks like you have created a second account, which will also interfere with your ability to comment within your thread and to accept an answer. See How can one link/merge/combine/associate two accounts/users? and/or I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them? for guidance on how to merge your accounts.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented Apr 22, 2017 at 8:49

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This is user720288. I used a disk editor to look for differences between the drive I had rotated out and one of the not initialized drives. As far as I could tell the only thing the RAID enclosure did was zero out the first sector. So I put the not initialized drives back into the enclosure in RAID 1 mode first (in case it tried to zero out the first sector again) and then copied the first sector from the rotated disk to the first sector of the array. I closed the disk in the editor, safely removed, unplugged and plugged back in, and just like that, it works again.

I haven't yet checked to make sure it definitely wrote to both drives. I also have no idea what the data in the first sector means so I don't know if being from an outdated mirror might affect how data is mirrored. I will test later but for now I'm just glad I have my data back and need to get to bed.

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