My RAID Hell

[DavidA]

Gah! I've been running a striped RAID over two drives for a year or so. A couple of days ago the hot weather killed one of the drives. Is there any way I can rescue the data on the drive that's still alive?

If I Google for it I just find a hundred companies offering to rescue my data for £1,000 which is too much for my personal data. A Linux boot CD that let me copy recoverable files to a USB drive would be perfect.

Thanks in advance.

[Lourdes]

Your files are split across the disks so you can't recover anything from just the one drive.

[SiM]

Unfortunately, its all gone mate

[Jay]

RAID 0 or RAID 1?

[Moby-Dick]

'fraid you've just learnt the hard way that a stripe set actually reduces your fault tolerence.

[Moby-Dick]

RAID 0 or RAID 1?

clues in the question there - he said a striped set

[Splash]

By all means run a striped set, but make sure your backups are decent and regularly tested.

It's dead and gone.

[Blitzen]

Try putting it in an air tight bag, place it in the freezer tehn re-introduce tyo your PC.

This has been know to work many times.

[Jay]

Try putting it in an air tight bag, place it in the freezer tehn re-introduce tyo your PC.

This has been know to work many times.

It has worked for me in the past.

Striped set normally mean sh*t creek

[DavidA]

Thanks all. I feared as much. I had been backing up fairly regularly, so I don't think there's much real damage, but there's always that nagging feeling that something was important on it...

FWIW, it's not *all* gone, because it will start to boot into Windows which suggests that it can get to *some* files.

I'll try the plastic bag trick.

[SiM]

Are you sure its a disk failure and not an os failure then?

Try a live linux distro and grab whatever files you can

[peterb]

If the disk is operational, but part of it is corrupted

Data Recovery Software - Hard Drive Recovery - RAID Data Recovery but it isn't something I have used.

might have something useful. I guess the whole drive was striped? If so, but you can read some data, the array signature is intact, but one drive is partially corrupted. Recovering data from a RAID 0 system is possible, but very difficult (and as yiou have found out, to have done professionally is very expensive)

I would never recommend using a RAID 0 system for critical data unless you have robust backup procedures in place, and even then iit would oonly be justified for a few special cases - which are unlikely to be found in a home system. Generally the read access may be a little faster, but under some circumstances write performance can be worse - and reliability of the system is reduced.

Good luck in your recovery efforts.

[DavidA]

Great response Peter. Thanks. I bit the bullet and re-formatted the working drive as it's one of those things that just annoys you until you get over it.

I think I'll stick with SATA and auto-backups from now on.