RAID Array question

My g.f's Packard Bell has died again, this time it looks like the motherboard, some form of Gigabit 650i varient, has failed. The warrenty with the dreaded "Tech Guys" covers it at least so they'll be coming out with a new one Monday.

My question is, will all the data on the HDD be available, the setup is a pair of 500GB drives in RAID 0 and AFAIK it's done via the motherboard. Will the identical replacement be able to recover the data and if so, what steps do I need to make damned sure they actually do to enable this to happen?

Yes - in theory an IDENTICAL motherboard should recover the data... however there is always the risk that the replacement mobo (if it is replaced) may not be identical in all respects, and the raid signature may be different.

That said, other posts on the subject suggest that if the raid controller is the same, there is a high probability that it will work, and somer have suggested that some arrays created with different controllers can work together - but there are no gurantees.

I'm not an expert on the details of how RAID0 is actually implemented though. If the system is truly dead, you don't really have many options left - if there is any life left in it, then back it all up first.

Failing that, once the new machine is replaced and the drives installed - if it doesn't recognise the raid, you might find one of the tools offered by these companies useful...

Zlon hard disk cloning and imaging

Data Recovery Software - Hard Drive Recovery - RAID Data Recovery

but I haven't used either of them myself.

I guess that isn't what you wanted to hear... :( - but if the system has failed, its the best I can suggest.

if you use Active Undelete (v.5.5 Enterprise edition) you can rebuild the array within windows in software and get the data off this way - i've used it in the passed and it has worked perfectly...

just make sure you get the enterprise edition as i wasted $40 on the 'standard' version which doesnt support RAID!

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Virtually re-creates Spanned, Mirrored (RAID-1), Stripped (RAID-0) and RAID-5 Volumes

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^^ the demo will show you if you can recover the files, but you need the full version to actually 'get' them...

As far as the RAID array goes, as long as it's the same RAID chipset it should be fine. The problem might be with how/when the system failed as you might have a problem if any cached data wasn't written back to the drives (especially with RAID 0).
Nothing you can do about it now though, I guess the only thing to do is to make sure they don't re-initialise the array when they re-create the raid set on the new board..

(You are removing the drives before it goes back for repair... aren't you? If not consider cloning both drives - not ideal, but should preserve the data for later recovery if it gets lost durring the repair process)

Mostly it works - i've had nVRAID arrays that translated from board to board (but not usually when it's a newer nforce chipset versus the original) and Intel's RAID seems very portable (i've moved from a P4-based system to quad core and the RAID worked first time) too.

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Originally Posted by peterb

(You are removing the drives before it goes back for repair... aren't you? If not consider cloning both drives - not ideal, but should preserve the data for later recovery if it gets lost durring the repair process)

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Well, they're at least coming to us, but previous experience has taught me not to expect a lot from them (they thought we had a dead HDD not mobo and thus replaced ONE out of the two HDD from the RAID array and wondered why they couldn't access the recovery partition on this machine's predecessor)

I might have to take Monday off work at this rate just to sit there and tell them what to do and tbh if it wasn't under warrenty, I'd have had parts sent out and replaced it myself.

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Originally Posted by Viper81

As far as the RAID array goes, as long as it's the same RAID chipset it should be fine. The problem might be with how/when the system failed as you might have a problem if any cached data wasn't written back to the drives (especially with RAID 0).
Nothing you can do about it now though, I guess the only thing to do is to make sure they don't re-initialise the array when they re-create the raid set on the new board..

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Shouldn't be a major issue I'm hoping, it failed whilst it was sitting waiting for a login to be clicked into Windows, so in theory no files were being specifically written to at the time (g.f turned it on, saw it got to the logon screen and then went to the loo, came back to a dead PC)

Hope you washed your hands