What You See
- You selected a drive and clicked “Rebuild”
- Controller began syncing or rebuilding
- Suddenly: RAID 5 now shows “Offline” or “Virtual Disk Missing”
What It Means
- The controller tried to write parity to a wrong or misordered disk
- An undetected second failure may have existed
- A power loss or sync conflict corrupted the config mid-process
What Not To Do
- 🚫 Don’t retry the rebuild again
- 🚫 Don’t replace the same drive and try again
- 🚫 Don’t start clearing or recreating arrays
The RAID controller doesn’t know which config is correct — it’s relying on you. A wrong guess during rebuild can overwrite valid parity with junk.
What You Can Do Instead
- Pause. Label all drives as they sit right now
- Use JeannieLite to check configuration and help diagnose your problem
- Get an ADR RAID engineer to connect remotely to help gain access to your files
Real-World Tip
This is one of the most common triggers for full data loss in RAID 5: a rebuild was initiated on the wrong member. It’s almost never salvageable after two or more rebuild attempts. But if you stop now, we can still recover and save your files.