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I've reinstalled Windows (moving from two RAID0 NVMe SSDs to a single NVMe SSD), and I've had two Windows striped volumes (2x 1000 GB SATA SSD, 2x 4000 GB SATA HDD) for data.

When reconnecting the disks of those striped volumes, the drives now show up as "basic, 931 GB, healthy" disks / partitions in Disk Management, rather than the dynamic drives with the striped volume over them.

How can I restore them to be recognized as striped volumes?

Additional info: Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix F-Gaming The raids for the SATA-SSDs and SATA-HDDs were set up without Windows' Disk Management Windows 10 21H1

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    You need to provide more info: 1)Motherboard model; 2)storage controller model & driver version; 3)did you setup the RAID within BIOS/UEFI (likely) or Windows? 4)Which version of windows?
    – gregg
    Commented Apr 8, 2022 at 13:19
  • It appears 'Dynamic Disks' are deprecated per MS. They suggest to use 'Storage Spaces' instead. As far as I know more modern RAID storage controllers don't manage RAID with Windows tools, but within the BIOS/UEFI or their proprietary SW
    – gregg
    Commented Apr 8, 2022 at 13:24
  • While not addressing the current issue, if your motherboard supports Intel RST, you can configure RAID as the SATA operation within the BIOS/UEFI firmware (I believe this would negate the issue of software RAID @harrymc describes in his answer)
    – JW0914
    Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 12:55

2 Answers 2

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You have apparently created the striped volumes in Windows, in effect creating a software RAID which is only known by Windows. Once you have wiped Windows out, the definition of the striped volumes is gone, so the new Windows only sees two separate disks.

In addition, striped volumes scatter the data all over the disks, so any recovery program that will read only one of the disks, will be unable to find the data.

You need to recover the striped volumes as striped volumes, which Windows cannot do. You will need third-party products for that. Unfortunately, such products are always commercial, although trial/evaluation versions might be enough for a one-time use.

One program which is said to be able to recover RAID is Recover My Files ($69.95), where Evaluation Mode is said to include RAID recovery. The procedure is described in the article RAID 0 (striping) recovery.

If Recover My Files doesn't work out for you, other RAID recovery products do exist. See for example Top 6 RAID Recovery Software.

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  • I bought the professional version of Recover my Files - the evaluation and standard options didn't support recovery from RAID. Recovery of my files went flawlessly, though it did take over a day to first scan the array. Money much better spent than the previous 100€ at a local file recovery service.
    – towe
    Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 16:04
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For me the drives still showed up as a striped pair I just needed to assign them a drive letter and they showed right up. all the data is still there.

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