NOTE: as you are recovering the raid volume to a new virtual (or psychical) disk, ensure you have enough free space somewhere to put the recovered volume, you could (in theory) after making all the disk images backed up delete and re-create your old raid to save the new/recovered volume to, if you don't plan to send your disks off to specialists if it doesn't work. (Reclaime is similar, and claims to offer the same thing but can MODIFIES YOUR DISKS DATA without warning, so use images not real hard-disks, and there is little to no actual info or guides about how to use Reclaime, unlike Runtime who reply to e-mail queries usually within 24 hours and have many video guides on youtube).

I would suggest connecting each drive externally, one by one (via a usb hdd caddy, or a simple sata to usb connector, Startech makes a good one) and create images (img files) using runtime's Raid Reconstructor ( ) it's free to make images from which you can then mount as physical disks using OSFMount (freeware, ).Īfter making images of ALL disks in your failed raid you can mount them virtually using OSFMount then attempt to recover the raid volume using various software options, such as the paid version of runtime's raid reconstructor ($99) or Reclaime. I'm fortunate enough to have tons of disks storage, as I'm using a 4-bay Drobo USB raid and HP microserver with raid5, but recovering yourself at home like-the-pro's without any risk to data loss isn't cheap if you don't have the tools like this. (if you have a 2tb disk, the image file will be 2tb). The only problem you might have is having enough disk space somewhere to place the images, as each file will be the size of the total disk, not just the size of used space. This way if anything messes up, you still have the option of sending your disks off to paid recovery services as you are not modifying any data on the disks. What I am doing (and what you should be doing, as it's what data recovery expert companies all are telling me) is start by making full-disk backup images of your hdd's before attempting to recovery anything.

*I had good results opening the images with ReclaiMe File Recovery* TLDR: no, you cannot force drives back onto the Intel array as raid info is saved to the on-board Intel raid device, so backup images using Runtime's Raid reconstructor trial, virtually mount them with OSFMount, Recover data with Runtime's paid version or other raid recovery software.

Reclaime pro total errors