Reading a RAID Stripe drive

[SanDiegoPC]

Working on a monster of a computer: Dell XPS. Heck the 3 video cards in this monster are each the size of my first laptop & the PSU is like a VW Beetle!!

But one of the hard drives went south & they were in a striped array. Customer wants me to replace these two small drives with 1TB drives and I contacted Dell support to see if the computer (3 years old) would see that large a drive. No problem so they say, no BIOS flash needed. So there's no problem getting the monster running again.

But for backing up the guys' data. I can't read either of these striped drives. I doubt they are both bad, but they tell me the data on them is critical. When I asked if they had a data backup, they gave me a 1TB external HD...but it was a virgin, still in the box ... so I'm not really going to feel bad if I can't recover the data.

But I'd like to learn how to do so, if it's possible. Anyone give me any ideas? Thank you for any and all suggestions

 

[boran]

a raid-0 failure which is due to a hardware fault on one of the disks is not recoverable I think.
You will only find files that are smaller than the stripe size, all others will be chopped up and devided over the two disks, so you will only have half the data.
If it is really valuable they should have made a backup.

One thing to try is contacting a professional data recovery company. but that is not going to be cheap.

 

[MStele]

You've only got half the data, so unless you can somehow get that other drive going the customer is screwed. If this was your friend, this is where you would tell them this is punishment for crappy backup practices. Since this is your customer, just tell them the score and offer suggestions on how to keep proper backups.

 

[GaryJohnson]

Questions: How has the drive been diagnosed as being "bad"? What does the BIOS see, what does the raid controller see, and what does the OS (or its install media) see?

Your options here are:
1. Repair the bad drive. How to do that is dependent on answers to the above questions.
2. Accept the drive is a loss, in which case I'm agreeing with Boron, you might be able recover files on the other drive that are smaller than the stripe size.

You probably need some software for that and googling around I found some: http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

I've never used it, and I can't imagine who would. Who keeps critical files on a non-redundant raid array without a backup? That's insane. Raid 0 on two drives is half as reliable as a single drive. High end PCs in the hands of non-pc people like this are few and far between.

 

[Nothinman]

But for backing up the guys' data. I can't read either of these striped drives. I doubt they are both bad, but they tell me the data on them is critical.

If it was critical they shouldn't have used RAID0. With only 1 drive working you've only got every other 64K (or whatever the strip size was) chunk of every file.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Yep I agree a Raid 0 was the wrong configuration. It was done the last time the drives went south on this machine. According to Dell's service tag it came with 160G Western Digitals. Now it has 250G Seagates. And the cust told me that it had been in the shop two years ago for drive failure.

Well, I'm going to pick up a pair of Western Digital 1.0TB drives for it today. Dell says it will have no problem reading them. As for his data, yep he's screwed unless he wants to ship the old drives elsewhere to be read in a cleanroom.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Questions: How has the drive been diagnosed as being "bad"? What does the BIOS see, what does the raid controller see, and what does the OS (or its install media) see?

Well, Gary it's a bit frustrating - I've tried all I can to read the drives one by one. Together the machine says there's no bootable disk. Individually, it just gives me a RAID error whenever it gets started (with one disconnected)

I tried reading them individually in another XP computer and no luck. Windows sees one of the drives, but then comes back saying it's unformatted and needs to be formatted before use. The other drive is not seen by Windows XP at all.

I also tried seeing them in this computer, using Windows7. I have a USB device for reading different drives. When I plug the drives into the device, power them up, and look in my Windows Explorer nothing happens. So this computer won't read either of them, using my tool.

I've done all I can do and will just have to break the bad news to the client that his data is gone, unless another company can retrieve it. At least I can get his PC running again.

 

[rasczak]

you may want to look at that controller. if it's been in twice for drive failures using the same config i'd be wary of it.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Agreed.. i would actually look into replacing the whole machine at this point so it's more reliable..
but yes, it seems like the data is lost unfortunately.

you may want to look at that controller. if it's been in twice for drive failures using the same config i'd be wary of it.

 

[corkyg]

Agree with all that has been said. Mission critical data for business should never be put on a RAID 0 array. Having said that, if they have the $$$, there are possible solutions:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GZAZ_enUS224US224&q=RAID+0+Recovery

 

[SanDiegoPC]

you may want to look at that controller. if it's been in twice for drive failures using the same config i'd be wary of it.

Agreed.. i would actually look into replacing the whole machine at this point so it's more reliable..
but yes, it seems like the data is lost unfortunately.

Yep I do think the controller onboard is bad. I installed Windows on the new RAID using two drives, and all went well until it rebooted. Then it couldn't find one of the drives in the RAID and of course, it failed to boot.

I went through messing with it for two hours, then quit. I then deleted the RAID and went to IDE format...reinstalled Windows on C and then called D a data drive & put the windows swapfile on it. Runs good and that's all he's going to get out of it.

 

[whiteonline]

You could at least try the freezer trick with the disks.
Put both in the freezer for 2 to 3 hours. Have the new disk in place on the system and formatted prior to taking the disks out.
Power it up and if the logical disk comes up, copy away as fast as possible.


Oops, just read your last post. Disregard.