Win7 soft-RAID failed, computer "jumped back in time"

I just rebooted my computer and upon logging into Windows, things seemed a little bit "off". I figured out rather quickly that everything was like it was two weeks ago. It was literally like everything I had done on my computer the last two weeks didn't happen.

I have 2x 750 GB hard drives in a software RAID on Windows 7 Professional. Everything has seemed fine up until now, and I have not seen any error messages related to hard drive failures.

I opened Disk Management, and I see the following information:

Disk 0, Dynamic, Online
    100 MB system reserved, 700 GB C:\ - status: "Failed redundancy"
Disk 1, Dynamic, Foreign
    (no more info, grayed out)
Missing, Dynamic, Missing
    100 MB system reserved, 700 GB C:\ - status: "Failed redundancy"
    (identical to Disk 0, except the "Missing" part)

I have no other disks in my setup, so I assume Disk 1 is really the missing disk that for some reason isn't recognized as part of the array.

Any ideas what happened here? Even if it was just a disk failure, why hadn't the other disk been updated for roughly two weeks? At least one of the disks work obviously, since I booted successfully (albeit into the past - really "back to the future" moment for me...).

Update: The event log says unexpected shutdown last night (I usually leave my computer on, and I just assumed Windows Update was the reason I was no longer logged in when I came this morning).

Nils

Posted 2012-01-21T12:36:22.920

Reputation: 163

Answers

It sounds like the mirror was "broken" sometime ago (roughly two weeks by your description) and after the system was restarted the "stale" disk was discovered first.

I would shut down, take disk 1 to a different machine and if the disk is functional, you might find your recent data on it.

dimitri.p

Posted 2012-01-21T12:36:22.920

Reputation: 240

I would rather leave only the disk 1 and try to boot from it. – kinokijuf – 2012-01-21T13:58:06.000

I thought it was about time for an upgrade anyway, so I bought a SSD disk and reinstalled Windows. The recent data was indeed on the other disk. Both of the 750 GB disks are now attached in the system (although no RAID). I have run checkdisk on both of them, and none of them are showing any problems (though I doubt I will trust them with important data). Seems I won't have a definite answer. Thanks! – Nils – 2012-01-29T20:33:06.737

Glad you found the data. It's a little strange you didn't get notified that the mirror was broken at some point. You might have hardware RAID available on your machine but more importantly, before you remirror the drives, make sure you have the Array Monitor Software for your controller loaded on your machine, with notifications enabled so you will know when/if something happens to the array before a reboot! – dimitri.p – 2012-01-29T22:43:34.343