RAID0 Recovery

[StraightPipe]

So, I've got a pair of 150GB raptors (R) in RAID0 on an Areca 1220 8 port SATA RAID card. It's got a single partition used for my OS (Vista64) and my applications.

Two weeks ago My PC had a hiccup, and wouldn't load Windows. The RAID controller reported a read error, and a few chkdsk's got me back up and running. Unfortuantely Windows backup kept throwing errors that the drive was locked and didn't want to make me a new backup, my last is about a month old, and it is already reloaded on a new pair of drives. I called WD and got the two old raptors RMA'd and a pair of new 150GB Veloci raptors (VR) showed up as advance replacements (bonus upgrade). Now I'm trying to get the data pulled off my old drives, and/or rebuild the array on the new VR's.

The only problem is one of the old raptors died the day before the VR's showed up. It's got molex and sata power, and neither would make the disk spin up (that spindle window is useful for something I got out my torx set and swapped the circuit board from the good raptor to the bad one, and viola, the disk spins up fine now, and windows recognizes it when connected to an external USB adapter. The problem is, I've only got one working circuit board between the two drives in the array.

I've been looking for another original style Raptor so I could snag the circuit board, but there does not appear to be any in town...ebay has them, but the auctions are all 2-5 days away from ending...

Is it possible to clone one of the the original raptors over to the velociraptors, one disk at a time?

Should I do it while the drives are connected through my RAID controller card?

If I successfully clone R1 to VR1 and R2 to VR2 individually how will I make the VR array active?

What software do you recommend for the cloning? I figure it needs to be a pretty low level tool.

 

[Blain]

If one of your RAID 0 drives is dead, then the RAID 0 array is dead also.
RAID 0 = 1/2 data on R1 & 1/2 data on R2.
1/2 data + dead Raptor = 0% data

Kiss your data good bye unless you pony up the $$$ for a recovery company to extract it from the drives.

 

[StraightPipe]

No, I dont think you read the post entirely before responding. I understand what striping is, and I understand how RAID system work or I wouldnt be attempting this recovery.

I can boot the drive that didnt fail just fine. If i take the circuit board off the live drive and put it on the dead drive, i can boot it just fine too. Problem is I only have one working circuit board between the two drives in the array, and for the array to function properly, I need them both live at the same time.

I'm probably just going to ebay an old raptor and use that circuit board to get my data free. That means I've got to wait a week or so to get the drive and do the rebuild...software would be much better.

I'd prefer to find some software that can clone each drive independantly to new drives, then mount the new drives on the RAID controller...

 

[StraightPipe]

bump..

 

[Binky]

I think many of the popular cloning programs can do sector by sector cloning. I have no idea if this will work for a raid drive but it's worth a try. I know that O&O Diskimage offers a sector by sector ("forensic") cloning of every sector on the drive, whether that sector is used/blank/hidden, whatever.