HELP! Motherboard Died!

I'm hoping I can get some guidance from the brilliant community.

ISSUE - Motherboard died, can I recover data?

ASSUMPTION - Data and HDDs are OK (8x HDDs in array plus 1x Parity plus 1x cache)

BACKGROUND - My unRAID server has been doing a fantastic job just sitting in the corner for a least 6 years. I've not done too much to it apart from HDD upgrades and a unRAID version upgrade. All has been hunky-dory. We have recently downsized to a smaller place, the kids have left home and we have been questioning the need for a server of this size (I have 15Tb in my unRAID) as we also no longer require it as a media server. Now my motherboard has died and I need help on a few points...

Along with the media (which I'm not overly worried about) was some photos and a few back ups I'd like to recover. Is there a way (via a HDD dock or something) to recover any data without having to replace the motherboard and get unRAID up and running again?

Failing that idea, what is the current recommended motherboard replacement for the ASUS M4A7B5T-M which this community recommended to me originally? I'm running an AMD Sempron CPU.

Always thought that running unRAID secured my data beautifully (which it does) but, of course, it can't guard against hardware failure... a warning to others regarding having a decent backup policy... don't rely on a single point of failure!

Is your signature up to date? Do you have a list of which drive is assigned to each logical slot?

While possible to recover data from individual drives, the risk is high given the details of your story. I'd be afraid you may have been running with bad drives, since 4.7 had no built in warning system to let you know of impending drive failure. I would be much more comfortable recommending that you walk back the system to a running state with the least amount of changes, in this case possibly even finding an identical motherboard used online somewhere.

If you are ok with taking a significant risk with your data, then yes, you can just hook each individual drive up to another computer one at a time and try to mount it using http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ assuming you are using a windows machine.

It may not be that bad, especially if you have successfully run a parity check recently.  You can attach that SAS card to just about any motherboard, then attach the drives and insert the flash drive and set the BIOS to boot from it, then boot and run the old Trust My Array procedure.  Then check you data.  You can skip the parity check initially, but should run it at some point, to check how readable all the drives are.

It would be a good idea to Upgrade to UnRAID v6, if you wish to continue.  V6 can do more things, and monitor your system much better, with good notifications of issues.  The upgrade guide includes hardware recommendations, based on what you might want to do with your server.  It does not include specific motherboard recommendations, but just about any modern board should work.

Thanks for the replies. No, my signature isn't quiet up-to-date but it is fairly close. I did look at upgrading to v6 but my hardware was not compatible so I decided against it has I was having no issues! ooops!

Thank you RobJ for the better news about placing the SAS card into another machine, that sounds doable if I can find a computer to borrow (we're all laptop users at home). Parity check was run only a few days ago so I'm confident about the state of the data.

jonathanm although the system is old I'm pretty confident of the integrity of the drives and therefore the data, it's just getting at it which is the issue.

RobJ

Just a thought with the process of putting the SAS into a different machine... I used all 8 ports on the SAS card plus 2 motherboard SATA ports, I can discard one of these HDDs as it is the cache but the array in based on 8 ports via the SAS card (incl. the parity drive) plus 1 SATA port on the board. Would this setup give me issues when firing the drives up on another board or would the 'Trust My Array' procedure get around that problem?

Thanks again

With your old version, the Trust My Array procedure is necessary to pick up the changed connections.  With newer versions, unRAID finds the drives by their serial numbers, no matter where they are connected.

Ahh I see, thanks again.