Major Raid 0 Problem

[superkdogg]

Hey. I do some tech work on the side, but I'm not formally educated. I know regular stuff, but this problem is beyond my knowledge and I'm hoping to get some help from you all.

Here's the scenario. Guy brings me computer. It won't boot to WinXP. He has a laundry list of other stuff, but that's the main thing. I plug it in and turn it on, and I find out that it has a 2x80 GB disk Raid 0 array. The array happens to be on the SIL 680 raid card, which I know from experience is a terrible card.

Both disks and the card appear to be working normally. The problem as I see it is that the card doesn't recognize the two disks are supposed to be a Raid0 set. The configuration utility says that Set 1 is disk 0 PM (primary master) and Set 2 is disk 3 SS (secondary slave).

So, is there any way to get the array fixed from this state? Is it as simple as telling the card to build another Raid 0 array with the same stripe size? Is there something else I need to do?

Please help me out. Thanks.

 

[superkdogg]

Oh yeah, I should add that the guy of course 'needs' his data and doesn't have any backups and the computer is a Systemax which is evidently tied with Tiger Direct. All things considered, I'm quite worried that this is going to go badly for the customer.

 

[amdskip]

Yeah I really don't see you getting any data back from that. It sounds like the array has been broken and you can't just go recreate it again.

 

[superkdogg]

Any other ideas?

 

[Fraggable]

As a computer tech guy myself, I'd suggest not messing with it anymore. As amdskip said the array has been broken or deleted, and it's not going to be easy to recreate it without data loss. If he didn't have it backed up that's his problem. If you mess with it any more you may end up deleting stuff or formatting a disk, making it harder and more expensive for a data recovery service to get it back.

Don't be apologetic that it's not recoverable, and don't indicate in any way that the fact he can't get his stuff back is your fault. Just tell him he needs to contact a service like OnTrack to have it recovered, and it's going to cost $2K minimum to have it done. Trust me, the more you mess with it, the worse it will get and the more likely you are to be blamed.

 

[Captante]

Originally posted by: Fraggable
As a computer tech guy myself, I'd suggest not messing with it anymore. As amdskip said the array has been broken or deleted, and it's not going to be easy to recreate it without data loss. If he didn't have it backed up that's his problem. If you mess with it any more you may end up deleting stuff or formatting a disk, making it harder and more expensive for a data recovery service to get it back.

Don't be apologetic that it's not recoverable, and don't indicate in any way that the fact he can't get his stuff back is your fault. Just tell him he needs to contact a service like OnTrack to have it recovered, and it's going to cost $2K minimum to have it done. Trust me, the more you mess with it, the worse it will get and the more likely you are to be blamed.

This is good advice ... the sad truth is that his odds of recovering data even with a recovery service arn't great with software RAID 0, but anything you do wis only going to compound the problem.

 

[klrjoe]

R stands for redundant, that is why I quit running raid0 , run a raid o+1 I have contacted professional data recovery services before regarding these types of issues and let's just say the quoted price would build me the best system money could buy right now...

 

[superkdogg]

Hey hey guys. I thought that I'd update this because I actually found a combination of tools that worked!

http://www.runtime.org/

Their raid reconstructor program allowed me to create an image of the raid array bit by bit and put that on a drive in one of my computers for editing, so as you guys wisely said-I couldn't screw up the drives any worse than they started out.

Then I used the getdataback program from runtime to recover the data from the image. I don't know what he had on there when the array broke, but I was able to recover about 25 gigs of stuff, which could very well be all that was on it.

I highly recommend these tools. They were (too) easy to use (weird options that are poorly defined, but the defaults worked). The raid reconstructor is free for 30 days and the getdataback gives read access but you need to pay the 70 US to get the copying function.

My only issue with the programs is that they end up removing all heirarchy of the directories. Thus, this guy had 5000 or so directories and all were started at the root (if that makes any sense). Translation is that there is no way in hell his data can simply be copied back to the orignal drives, but at least it's still there. Unfortunately, I will not have it in my heart to charge him the $2k that the 'pros' would charge.

*While this post reads like an advertisement, I assure you it's not. Just that these tools should be publicized more because not all raid 0 arrays are dead when you think they are and I was lucky enough to prove that.

 

[DrGreen2007]

I purchased getDataBack a while back, charged my boss for it, but I kept the program since it was purchassed by me, in my name.

its payed for itself several times over, great app !