HELP! - Rescue my Intel RAID

Just had to post this one, after a narrow escape:

LESSON: ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE UPDATING BIOS FIRMWARE!

While diagnosing some sleep/wake issues on an ASUS P8H77-I motherboard, I was forced to update the BIOS. While this is pretty easy on the Asus boards, Be aware that sometimes a BIOS update can wipe the Intel RAID controller configuration!

Looking at the RAID management screen in the BIOS it was obvious that two of the 4 RAID-5 disks had somehow been marked as 'non-RAID' and therefore were not members of the set anymore.

All may not be lost however, if you encounter this, and you know your RAID disks are good - in other words they were ok before the update, then you could try this:

http://www.overclock.net/t/478557/howto-recover-intel-raid-non-member-disk-error

Essentially:
- Boot into the RAID config (CTRL-I on my board)
- DELETE the RAID configuration [just wipes the RAID sig on the disks]
- CREATE a NEW RAID configuration of EXACTLY THE SAME SETTINGS as before
- Reboot
Windows will still not recognise the partition I discovered but you can recover this using TESTDISK:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

- Download TestDisk
- Start it up, and let it scan for partitions
- you should see your missing volume within seconds.
- Stop the scan (unless you have more AWOL volumes)
- Write the partition signature
- Reboot again.

Data was restored 8-)

More details here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-2226542.html

Remember:
ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE UPDATING BIOS FIRMWARE!

[Your experience may vary from the above, but I felt it was worth posting that this worked flawlessly for me]