RAID 0 Disaster

DanielMMS

DanielMMS

DanielMMS

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I'm really hoping that something can be done to avoid the wife removing my testicles with a blunt instrument.

In our main desktop (spec in sig), we have an SSD boot drive then two Samsung HD103SJs in RAID0 for data. I arrived home last night to be told that the PC took an age to load up and Firefox was "missing". A bit of investigation showed that only the SSD was available in Computer, Computer Management etc.. I checked the BIOS and, whilst one HD103SJ is showing, the other is not. I have tried swapping over SATA and power cables but to no avail so it seems that the missing drive has failed. I have had drives fail in the past and there has always been some kind of warning - but not in this case. I have not checked whether the drive is actually spinning or is completely dead, nor have a looked for a burned PCB.

Normally I'm very good at backing up but, you guessed it, due to being ridiculously busy over the last month, it has been forgotten. And of course there is stuff created over the last month that I (or rather my wife) would be more than a little disappointed to lose.

I'm guessing this is a lost cause but is there any hope... or suggestions...?
 
assuming you determin the drive is faulty I would swap over the PCB's to see if the other drives works.. if it does obtain an identical drive and "bish bash bosh" its all working again... (usually not hte PCB that fails but its worth a go)
 
Check out Raid Reconstructor from runtime.org.

It rebuilt a Raid5 array a couple of years ago for me after 2 drives failed.

The first thing to do is to avoid any writes to the drives until you have analyzed them fully. Boot off a different hard drive if you have one.
 
MilanoChris said:
Why on earth do you have important data on a RAID 0 partition? The mind boggles. :confused:
Click to expand...

quoted for agreement... RAID 0 should only really be used for temporary file managment like holding video for editing for example, but there is no performance gain from having your personal files, what ever they may be, in RAID 0. I know it doesn't help but your just asking for trouble and a severe nut crunching from the missus ;)
 
Does the drive power up? If it does and doesn't make any grinding or knocking sounds then beg/borrow/steal a USB caddy (ok, not steal). Drives connected indirectly can sometimes not stress you system out and may mean the data is readable - use something like R-Studio to reconstruct the array and pull the data off.

A bit too late after the event, but I guess you've learnt about RAID arrays, appropriate use and the importance of backups!
 
Thanks guys. At least I have a few things to try when I get home!

And, yes, I had been meaning to take the array apart but had just not the time to do it. Typically!
 
I guess sometimes you have to learn the hard way...

RAID 0 - Fast but doubles risk of data loss over single drive
RAID 1 - No speed gain but provides redundant mirror of data (hint: use this one for important infromation)
 
Stelly said:
My god important data on RAID0, you deserve your testicles to be removed ;)

Stelly
Click to expand...

The chance for one of two drives failing is twice that of a single drive. But the chance of a single drive failure in normal operation isnt really that high.

If one drive is 1:1,000,000 then one of two is 1:500,000

I'd say this was bad luck more than anything.
 
skyripper said:
The chance for one of two drives failing is twice that of a single drive. But the chance of a single drive failure in normal operation isnt really that high.

If one drive is 1:1,000,000 then one of two is 1:500,000

I'd say this was bad luck more than anything.
Click to expand...

It's a lot higher than that. I've never owned a HDD that lived past 10 years without dying on me, and I've had several die in under 2 years.
 
i'e had two drives go on me ten years, one of them was my own fault (blew a sata controller up). The other just stopped working in use then refused to spin up. I've no idea how many drives Ive owned in total but at a guess it's somewhere around 8-9.
 
Ok so I've now been released from hospital after a failed attempt to re-attach my membra virilia following their ritual removal when my wife heard the happy news...

I have made a little bit of progress, in a clutching at straws kind of way. I identified the faulty HDD and found that it was not powering up at all which made me think it was the PCB that was at fault. I had a third HD103SJ bought at around the same time with a very similar serial number and swapped the PCBs. I placed the faulty HDD in a caddy, turned it on and hey presto it span etc which confirmed that the PCB was at fault.

I then reinstalled the HDD into my PC in exactly the same set up as before it died. The HDD is now found in BIOS but my rather naive hopes that the RAID array would simply leap back into life have been dashed. The HDDs do not appear within My Computer. However, if you go into Disk Management they show as one 2TB (or thereabouts) HDD that needs to be initialised. I have tried Raid Reconstructor but this can only identify a single 2TB HDD - so that was a dead end.

I'm guessing that either the PCB swap hasn't worked properly or I am missing something completely. Any thoughts...?!
 
Can you initialise the drive without reformatting? This may be the missing link that Windows needs.

Don't take this as gospel. I have never dealt with a raid problem.

Otherwise will a linux live drive see and read the raid drive for recovery?

andy.
 
Not initialised usually means no MBR sig. If you really, really want a chance of getting your data back it would be best not to write anything to the disks, instead try Winhex (forensic mode IIRC) and open the disk array (tools, open disk, physical media) and see if it shows the partition and on clicking on that partition, the files. You do not need windows to initialise the array to do this. You may need to scan for lost partitions, Tools, Disk Tools, Scan for lost partitions.

Note that winhex is free to evaluate but requires registration to recover big files.

A little confused with your reconstructor reference, 2 off HD103SJs in RAID0 (1TB each) will appear as a single 2TB drive.
 
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Thanks for the help guys.

Ironically, doing something ridiculously simple has done the trick. I thought I would have a look at the RAID set up within BIOS. So I entered BIOS, changed the SATA mode from ADCI (or whatever it is) to RAID, re-booted and double checked the RAID set up - all seemed fine. I then re-booted which caused BSOD. So I changed back from RAID to AD whatever, re-booted and amazingly everything is back to normal.

No prizes for guessing what I am doing with a caddy at the moment... Especially since my wife is sat behind me with an exceedingly large pair of scissors...!
 
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