Does this mean one of my hard drives crashed?

[TexasMike]

Hi, I am new to this forum and didn't know where else to turn for my PC problem. I would appreciate any advice you all might have.

I have 2 Samsung HD322HJ 290GB harddrives set up in RAID 0 formation. Usually, when my computer boots up it has them listed right underneath each other like this and says:

Samsung HD322HJ Serial#12345678.... Member Disk(0)
Samsung HD322HJ Serial#12345678.... Member Disk(0)


However, today I went to restart my computer after having some problems with microsoft office randomly saying I couldn't open it because it wasn't installed and the startup screen gave me a bunch of information that i couldnt read at first because it happened so fast but i noticed that the RAID configuration had changed to this

Samsung HD322HJ Serial#12345678.... Member Disk(0)
Samsung HD322HJ Serial#12345678.... Error Occured(0)

Now the computer won't boot up at all and I am completely lost on how to fix it. Any ideas?

[Fraz]

Any ideas?

Have you got a backup?

[TexasMike]

No ... I was actually going to by an external harddrive to back all my things up today ... I should have done it earlier. Do you know what exactly that means though as far as whether or not the hard drive has actually crashed?

[Funkstar]

The raid configuration in the BIOS (I assume it's onboard RAID) should be able to give you a little more info on what the error is.

I would guess that is the drive isn't completely dead, then your array is probably trashed. All data on it will be lost.

Just wipe everything and restore from backups. simples.

[TexasMike]

Alright, im at the Bios Setup Utility, but I can't exactly find where it would say what errors there are with my second hard drive, i have found the boot priority and also the storage configuration where i made the two hard drives into the raid configuration in the first place. Any ideas on where to go to find the actual error?

[XA04]

Welcome to the forums.

Not sure but you'd get more help asking here: http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardware/

Wait for a mod to move it though/PM a mod.. don't repost.

Edit: Oh you posted it twice anyway....

[Steve]

Could be an unrecoverable read error has sent the array out of sync, rather than a dead disk. Hard to tell from that info.

Not sure what methods, if any, there are of recovering from this (on the cheap, at least).

[Funkstar]

some information would be handy.

What motherboard? what BIOS? what RAID controller?

All these things would be good to know first

(i can't answer anyway as I don't have a system I can check with, and have never used onboard RAID before anyway)

have you checked to see what either the manual or the mobo manufacturers website says about the error?

[TexasMike]

Asus p5Q prd mother board, bios version 1004 ... does this help? i am not sure about the raid controller

[Stoo]

Merged threads

[peterb]

A data recovery company might bde able to get some data back from the array - at a cost. Prices start at about £350-£400 upwards, although many operate a "no fix, no fee" policy. Runtime software (www.runtime.org) offer some les expensive Raid recovery options - but the success or otherwise depends on how badly the array is damaged. As others have said, if it is a hard drive failure (total failure) all the data is lost. If the array headers are damaged, then it may be pssible to recreate the array and salvage something.

If the data is valuable, and you wnat to try to recover it yourself, clone the teo drives to 2 new ones - then at least if you make a mistake in recovering the data, you still have the originals. (Of course, if the drive really is faulty, yoiu won't be able to clone the data - your remedy then is speacialist recovery)

Its too late to extol the need to back up for any disk based system - and even more so with Raid 0. However I would question why you are using RAID 0 for storage of permanent data anyway. The benefits (small) of RAID 0 are really for operating system disks (where you might get a small speed increase) or for applications such as databases, where the theoretical performance increase might be realised - and then matched with an effective back-up strategy.