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TheDellinator

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February 28th, 2026 05:59

Help with virtual raid I accidentally replaced. Urgent! Please Help!!

Hello, I think i made a major error and Im not sure how to get myself out of it. my setup is a dell 730XD with 4 18 tb drives and 2 512 ssd drives. My original setup had 2 18 TB in slots 0 and 1 and the 2 512 ssd drives in slots 12 and 13 respectively. I had set up the 2 18 tb in a virtual drive raid 1for data storage and the 2 512 ssd drives in raid 1 for the os install with a backup for protection. Here’s where things went off the rails. I bought 2 more 18 TB drives for additional data storage and put them in slots 3 and 4. I then went into life cycle like I did the first time and tried to set up another virtual raid 1. I planned on having each drive have a backup for protection. But when I made the new virtual raid 1 the other 2 I had made disappeared. I can no longer boot into windows or do anything other than bios and life cycle stuff. All that to say, can I recover from this? Is there a way to soft rebuild the raids as if it never happened or some way to keep my data and just remake the raid? Im completely lost right now and could really use some guidance.

DELL-Erman O

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14.9K Points

March 2nd, 2026 12:10

Hi,

Your data is most likely still safe  the RAID layout was overwritten, but the actual disks weren’t touched. Do not initialize anything.

Open the PERC RAID BIOS (Ctrl+R)

Check whether the controller reports a Foreign Configuration.

  • If it appears: choose Import Foreign Config.
    This usually brings back the original RAID1 volumes right away.

If no foreign config is detected

Recreate your previous arrays exactly as they were:

  • OS RAID1: drives in slots 12 and 13 (SSDs)
  • Data RAID1: drives in slots 0 and 1 (18 TB)

Critical: When creating them, pick NO initialization.
This allows the RAID controller to read the existing metadata from the disks.

Adjust the boot order

Ensure the SSD RAID1 array is first in the BIOS boot list.

If Windows still doesn’t load

Use a Windows installation USB/DVD and run the standard boot repair commands:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
  • Do NOT initialize any of the original disks.
  • Do NOT clear a foreign configuration without examining it.
  • Do NOT write anything to the original RAID arrays until recovery is confirmed.

Hope that helps!

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