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I have a server that died, though the drives appears fine. There are four of them, with a 10GB mirrored volume for the boot, and the rest as a RAID5 array spread across the four drives. When I connect them to my windows 7 box, I can import the foreign drives, and even browse/rebuild the mirrored volume, but it won't seem to touch the RAID5 volume.

Is this a limitation of Windows 7? Do I need to attach them to a box that has Windows Server installed to recover the data?

Update: The drives are software RAID managed by windows.

Goyuix
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  • What type of RAID controller were the drives on? Did you move the controller into your Win7 box and connect the drives to it? I also dont see how you can be doing mirroring and RAID5 with only 4 drives. – DanBig Jan 26 '10 at 16:11

2 Answers2

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This is a limitation of Windows 7. Only Windows Server versions support RAID-5 volumes.

Evan Anderson
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    Finding a plain-lanaguage reference on this is proving difficult. Here's what I *can* find (search for the phrase "You can create RAID-5 volumes only on computers..."): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc786912(WS.10).aspx – Evan Anderson Jan 26 '10 at 17:43
  • I loaded up a copy of Server 2008 R2 and the volumes worked like magic. Thanks. – Goyuix Jan 27 '10 at 03:51
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You will need to have the same controller that was managing the RAID5 installed in the Win7 box. From what I can understand by your post, just plugging in RAID5 set to a machine without a RAID controller is going to get you nowhere.

DanBig
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  • I think he already mentioned that he tried it from the same Win 7 box to see the RAID 5 but it did not work. – proy Jan 26 '10 at 15:52
  • I kind of thought from the description it was implied this was software RAID... I guess not. I have updated the question. – Goyuix Jan 26 '10 at 17:35
  • Why the downvote, question wasn't even clear. – DanBig Jan 26 '10 at 17:44