RAID 0 crash - can I recover?

[boatillo]

OK, so I guess my computer froze one too many times over the weekend trying to play Conan and now my bootconfig is suddenly gone.

Raid 0 Seagates on a DFI NF4 ultra-d, Windows XP Pro SP2

Froze a couple times Sunday while I was just using Firefox, restarted and ran an chkdsh /r, completed and booted up. Played Conan for a few minutes, Alt-tabbed and FPS went to crap so I exited and restarted computer. Took about 5 minutes to pass Windows XP screen, I figure something is still borked so I start from Windows XP cd, run a chkdsk /r again before I do the Windows repair option....something chkdsk did killed my boot

NVRAID says the setup is still "healthy" hah

Windows CD does not see a valid Windows installation on C:

BOOTCONFIG /SCAN does not find a valid file

FIXMBR does not find a valid file

All I want to do is recover everything in My documents, place it on another computer or drive. Can I rebuild a boot file? Help!

 

[Cogman]

You should have headed the warnings about Raid 0. You are screwed.

The reason is because half of all your data is on the HD that failed. So now, even if you where to be able to recover anything it would just be garbage. Tough luck.

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Cogman
You should have headed the warnings about Raid 0. You are screwed.

The reason is because half of all your data is on the HD that failed. So now, even if you where to be able to recover anything it would just be garbage. Tough luck.

That was harsh, but Cogman is 100% right. When a RAID 0 array screws up, it's all gone.

 

[boatillo]

Both drives are 100% mechanically sound, my raid config just got screwed All the data is there, something just needs to tell my computer that! I'm going to try this raid reconstructor proggie.

 

[Rafael]

Well, I never had RAID 0 config on my computers, and afaik Cognan is right.
But I have a friend that lost his raid array, and started over again and recovered part of his personal files with those recovery programs.
Since you want your personal data back, I think it might worth a try.

GL!

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Rafael
Well, I never had RAID 0 config on my computers, and afaik Cognan is right.
But I have a friend that lost his raid array, and started over again and recovered part of his personal files with those recovery programs.
Since you want your personal data back, I think it might worth a try.

GL!

This may be the way to go here. See, when the RAID 0 array is toast, it's just gone. That's all there is to it. Now this doesn't mean if you rebuild the array and reformat, etc., you won't be able to use a recovery program to get files off.

I'm not sure how well this will work though, as stated the way RAID 0 works is data is split up between the two disks. This is the risk with RAID 0, should have had a backup drive.

 

[Rafael]

Yeah Tarrant! That is why I think he could not get all the files back.
Good part of the files were corrupted, and could not be recovered. But he got some of them.

So it is not 100% this method, but I think it worth a try since "all is lost"!

Good luck!

Edit:

Forgot to say that I agree with Terrant, when using RAID 0 always have a 3rd HD to store personal data and backup. And use RAID 0 just for OS.

 

[taltamir]

And you keep important documents on a RAID 0 array without backup WHY? I mean, if you kept it on a single drive without back it would be bad enough and attributed to ignorance... but raid0?

Your data is pretty much kaput

If you want to have any shred of a chance of getting data back, call a data recovery company. IF anyone can do it, they can. I doubt you are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for whatever was on that computer.

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: taltamir
And you keep important documents on a RAID 0 array without backup WHY? I mean, if you kept it on a single drive without back it would be bad enough and attributed to ignorance... but raid0?

Your data is pretty much kaput

If you want to have any shred of a chance of getting data back, call a data recovery company. IF anyone can do it, they can. I doubt you are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for whatever was on that computer.

There's no doubt a data recovery company can retrieve the data, that's what they do. You're right though, it's a steep fee for such a small request.

 

[undeclared]

He can recover it back, as if nothing happened, IF the config is very simple to recover/figure out where one starts and the other one continues etc

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: xtwells
He can recover it back, as if nothing happened, IF the config is very simple to recover/figure out where one starts and the other one continues etc

This doesn't explain very much, but I think I know what you're talking about. Figuring out how to repair a "broken" RAID array can often mean you have to have some extensive knowledge about how exactly it works, and some specifics on the sectors, etc.


What this will most likely come down to is whether or not the OP wants to pay for some kind of RAID recovery software, or some company to do it. Is $99(wild guess here) worth the data that should have been backed up?

 

[RebateMonger]

I'd take a look at the NVidia forums for informaiton on recovery.

Search of NVidia nForce Motherboard Forums for "Recovery"

 

[QuixoticOne]

I don't know how big your drives are, but I'm of the impression that you just used RAID-0 for performance, not high capacity, so maybe your drives aren't that big. In that case, I'd spend $100 on a 1TB drive, create two partitions on that, and image copy DRIVE 0 -> partition 0, DRIVE 1 -> Partition 1. Then when everything is safely backed up, go to town with the recovery tools / techniques you can find, and if something doesn't work well, just restore the drives from your back up and try something else.

This is one reason I don't like pseudo hardware raid.. if it breaks you often don't know HOW your data was really spread out over the discs, and there's no source code to look at to figure it out to aid in recovery.

If you can manage to un-RAID it with some raid anti-striping tool (or even the normal RAID drivers if it thinks the set is healthy), you
can get a 2nd 1TB drive or whatever and unstripe the RAID onto the 2nd 1TB drive and THEN it'll be a more simple matter of NTFS recovery without the RAID aspect to it.

As for your data being "all gone", it takes a certain amount of time to "format" a drive because writing all that data is a slow process. It takes a certain amount of intentional software to actually write megabytes of data to a drive as well since that involves many blocks, many I/O operations, etc. So if you just had a crash / glitch that lasted a few seconds there is a limit to how much data could possibly have been corrupted by being improperly written over that few seconds time. Maybe a few megabytes. Other than that, though, the data on the drive would have to be intact because it couldn't possibly have had the time / opportunity / configuration to even be corrupted in that little time. That's small comfort if it was your system MFT and the copies of it that got wiped, but at least the rest of the data should still be sort of mostly recoverable if you try hard enough because only a little actually got overwritten. Now the problem is like finding ways to estimate the partition table, the MFT, the directory structures, etc. Recovery tools can often do it mostly...

In the future consider doing backups, though, RAID really increases your chance of massive failure leading to data loss in certain circumstances like a glitch in the OS or whatever, even for RAID 1, RAID 5.

PS I consider scandisk / chkdsk to be the "kiss of death" for data.. I've had them make the situation worse more often than making it better. I would NOT run those without a good backup FIRST no matter how messed up the drive is. I expect 3rd party disk recovery tools are better than Microsoft's own ones.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Just because the RAID-0 stripe is not bootable, does not mean that it cannot be seen as a single drive by the OS. On a couple of occasions, I have been able to access a degraded stripe as a data disk even though it was no longer bootable.

If you have a spare HD, try installing your OS to that drive, then update it to at least SP-2. Then, see if it can see your RAID array as a drive. This may or may not work but you have nothing to lose in this case except the time needed to try it.

 

[TheKub]

Originally posted by: boatillo
RAID 0 crash - can I recover?

Sure you can! Just restore from your backups, you do have backups right?

 

[resinboy]

been there,done that- 2 years ago, and I was warned! And the very little performance gain was NOT worth it, I just started running a Raptor for my boot drive, and it felt the same. Yeah, large file transfers were a little faster.............

 

[taltamir]

actually yellowbeard makes a good point...
maybe you have a corrupt windows boot file, and everything else could be good and dandy.

Does anyone know of a nix with a live CD that has nvidia mobo raid drivers preinstalled?
If so he could just burn a CD and boot from it, and see if the array is visible.

Also, I don't know about you, but my data is worth far more to me then 300$.

Even the trivial stuff, like my collection of downloaded funny movies... Considering how many hours it took, 300$ to restore it would be less then a cent per hour of work of redownloading (and I will never get all of it back). I don't know about you, but I make more then a cent an hour. My time is worth more then that.

Now if you can recover it yourself, all the more power to you. use those 300$ to buy a raid1 backup.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Fedora 9 Live CD or Ubuntu 8.04.x Live CD ought to be able to use DMRAID to mount / check a NVIDIA fake RAID.
I can't promise because I don't use DMRAID or those live CDs much, but I know it is possible in the full OS do use DMRAID, and I don't see why it should be impossible from the LiveCD.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=630644