Your RAID 5 is offline. One drive shows failed. Everything is down.
Before you panic — or make a mistake — know this:
This is the most recoverable kind of RAID 5 failure — if you act carefully.
Common Missteps That Destroy Recovery Chances:
- Starting a rebuild without verifying the correct drive failed
- Swapping a drive before checking foreign config flags
- Letting the OS initialize the disk or force mount volumes
Most data loss happens after the failure — not during it.
What Likely Happened:
RAID 5 is fault-tolerant to one drive failure. But when that drive failed:
- The system marked the array as degraded or offline
- Some controllers (e.g., PERC, MegaRAID) didn’t preserve metadata
- A misread or misstep caused parity sync instead of rebuild
What You Can Do Now:
✅ Power down the system safely (if still online)
✅ Do not force import or initialize
✅ Use JeannieLite™ to identify the failed drive, array structure, and rebuild readiness
✅ Call ADR. We can recover this without imaging all drives