Ouch. Lost a drive in my RAID

Discussion in 'Technical' started by melbo, Nov 17, 2007.


  1. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    I'm running a RAID Stripe 0 on my home Desktop. RAID 0 puts two SATA drives together to form one drive. The MB splits the data between the two so the read write is about twice the normal speed.

    So, I lost one of those drives today and without them both, the data is lost. Shoulda woulda coulda made a backup on the other non-raid drive in that machine. Anyone know of a data recovery outfit?

    Some cursory searches have shown that RAID repair and recovery runs $500 or more.
     
  2. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    My former geek told me that he was getting upwards of a grand for a full recovery using the tools he had at the time. And worse, it isn't always possible, it depends on what and how the drive failed. If it was the motor only, the job is easy, if the disk is damaged (say like a head crash) there may be only file fragments. Luck with it. FWIW, I use a second machine and copy data from one to the other with a palm drive. Next go 'round, I think I'll use a palm drive exclusively for backup data. May also put the OS on a static drive or something similar if the technology will just come down a few bux in price.
     
  3. hartage

    hartage Monkey+++

    Should have just picked mirroring raid instead of striping. Mirrored will improve your read speed like stripping will, just not the write speed. If you were not going to benefit from improved write speed anyways..... Of course there is raid 0+1 where you get both.... just need 4 drives though. Sorry to hear about your hd crash.
     
  4. annie

    annie Monkey+++

  5. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    Thanks.
    THe RAID was my system disc and I had another plain IDE HD for DATA. Problem was that I as running out of room on the Data drive and was in the process of moving 30-40 GB of home video and pictures over to the RAID when it failed.

    Just bought a cheap 500GB and am installin TinyXP on it just so I can get a look at what is left of these other 3 drives. I'm hoping that my "Cut and Paste" failed before it finished and didn't get to execute the Cut from the data drive.

    I'm in big trouble with my wife if I lost that and it just might be worth paying for recovery. I just picked up this http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm and am going to try it after I get back into that system on the new HD and then reattach the rest of the drives.

    More later. "Twill be a long night
     
  6. E.L.

    E.L. Moderator of Lead Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Melbo, I like the new smilie. Ironic how accurate it is....."heel toe, heel toe."
     
  7. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    manged to scrape most of my files off of this mess. It's strange in that it almost looks like sabotage. The 2 disk RAID and the single ATA HD were all messed up. The backup disk looks like it was formatted. Found some pretty powerful tools to take a look at data under formats and deletes.

    More later. I'm dog tired after 30 hours at this screen.
     
  8. zarraza

    zarraza Survivalist in training

    by chance - were those powerful tools you found to peek at data under formats and such FREEWARE or were they at least inexpensive - and if you don't mind, could you share some links? i have been researching freeware for a while, but finding time to test on an actual failed drive is tough, especially when our users need their machines back ASAP and most of our equipment is still under warranty so we don't get to keep it to play!



    When you get that machine back up and running try CARBONITE

    i had my laptop backing up about 3GB just the other day, and finally got my server up - and currently have a 187GB backup in process - i back up my server both to my NAS drive (netgear SC101 with individual drives - NO MIRROR) and then back up to carbonite - i think i'm covered in the event of a crash.

    i tell just about everyone i know that even might have a tad bit of important data - first i ask how important that data is - then i tell them that it's not a matter of IF your computer will crash, it's a matter of WHEN your computer will crash - wouldn't you rather be backed up for when that crash happens rather than wish you would have backed up because you thought your computer was invincible?
     
  9. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    Sure.

    I tried File Scavenger. http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
    There are a bunch of different purchase options. IIRC, $89

    I used Active File Recovery http://www.file-recovery.net/ with the most success. Starts at $29

    Both can re-assemble a RAID array with software but since I had a mechanical problem with one of the SATA drives, It didn't work that way. I was able to deep scan each drive and recover everything I needed. Not sure how that worked but it did.

    Both are available as torrents as well.

    More info is available on those sites and they also offer different degrees of assistance. My problem is fixed and I now have a redundant automatic backup system in place.

    This article is Awesome and the solution is free.
    Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive
     
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