Raid Array Dead

mattpc · 4 Jan 2008 at 12:17

I run a 4 disk raid array from a rocketraid PCI card. Was using it as normal when it issues a warning beep, locks up and resets. When it gets to the raid array bios screen it says broken raid 1/0 remained members 1,3 and you get the option to discard, power off or continue. I click continue and it then says broken raid 1/0 remained members 2,4, i click continue again and then the machine fails to boot. Any ideas how I can restore my array or at least recover my data please? HEELP-- thanks.

card is Highpoint RocketRaid 1810A oh and it's running in Raid 10 mode. Dont know if it makes any difference but I was writing to the disks using a DVD ripping software at the time which was just some piece of freeware. Don't know if that upset the disks?

Not getting anywhere at the moment so any ideas would be appreciated.

mattpc · 4 Jan 2008 at 18:13

Tried various things now and have now hooked up 1 drive to getdataback software on another machine and am trying to image each disc and then use raid reconstructor to claw all the data out of the array.

mattpc · 5 Jan 2008 at 09:51

getdataback seems to be able to read the disk and show me lots of the folders when reading one disk so the data is defo still there in some form. So what I am now doing is imaging individual drives with raid reserector and hoping that it will eventually piece the 4 images together so I can safely extract my data. It takes probably 5-7 hours to do each drive tho. After that it is going to be new pc time I think....

mattpc · 5 Jan 2008 at 18:46

It is possible the card is at fault I suppose? I don't think it is a disk problem as all four disks are recognised by the array it's just the raid array appears to be broken and each pair has been divided in to two instead of being recognised as a whole by the card.

mattpc · 5 Jan 2008 at 21:14

It is making me reconsider. I am thinking of ditching my array and going down the raptor route and just using another hard disk to do backups of the content of the raptor. I went for a 4 disk array because I thought I would be safe from failures. Sadly I've been caught out and although I hope to get my data back I've lost at least two days of use of my main PC which I do everything on.

mattpc · 6 Jan 2008 at 01:42

I left the computer imaging the 2nd of the first pair of drives. Therefore hopefully I can recover my data from these two. I will try this first before imaging drives three and four.

mattpc · 6 Jan 2008 at 19:42

unfortunately im still imaging because the first pair couldnt be read when I tried to view them so I've had to image the 2nd pair as well.

mattpc · 6 Jan 2008 at 23:25

so the latest is for anyone who is interested is that i finished imaging the drives and it could not make head nor tail of the data but it did put the images in the correct order when i used all four images on raid reconstructor. So I then took the first pair which it had put in order and opened those on their own. Success! Well at least it could read them and made a .vim file. Now I have opened this image in getdataback and this is now seeing what it can find which will hopefully be most of my files if I'm lucky. I will have to leave this going overnight and then check in the morning.

mattpc · 7 Jan 2008 at 17:01

ByteJuggler said:
I've said this before and I'll say it again. RAID != Backup/Disaster recovery. RAID is about availability, not disaster recovery. The difference in emphasis is subtle but very important IMO. Irresepective of whether you use RAID (of whatever form), you should always still have a disaster recovery/backup solution in place. Always.

oh absolutely but... of course I was going to configure another drive to back everything up but I never got round to doing it......