HD failure recovery Question...

94jedi

Hey guys...my buddy has entrusted me w/ recovering his failed RAID array. He has a Dell XPS that has (had) a RAID-0 (software "Intel Array") comprised of 2 300GB disks. I've already lectured him on the RAID-0 equals RAID-NOTHING topic. One of the disks has failed and he desperately needs me to recover his data. I'm going to give RAID-reconstructor a shot but he was telling me that someone recommended him to use "spinrite" which I've never heard of. Have any of you guys ever dealt with a failed disk on a RAID-0 array?

Thoughts, tips????

dynamik

It depends on the condition the drive is in. Spinrite will essentially go through the drive bit by bit, and if it encounters a bad bit, it will attempt to move it to a good area of the drive. You'll obviously need the drive to be recognized by the BIOS and accessible.

RAID Reconstructor would require the drive to be in a similarly good condition. It's not going to be able to reconstruct anything if there is a physical problem with the drive. If that was the case, you'd probably have to ship it off to a facility that will take it apart in a clean room and mirror the data to another drive. Then you may be able to do something with RAID Reconstructor. I would assume some places would take both drives and attempt to do the recovery from start to finish.

When we have to ship drives off for people, the minimum is $700, and I've seen bills in the thousands. We have one lady who is a professional photographer, and she's been in three times. She keeps all her data on external USB drives with no backup. The last time she was in was because she dropped it while it was on. There was no recovery since the drive got carved up from the fall

tiersten

What are exactly is wrong with the drive? Bad sectors? Doesn't get detected at bootup? It makes scraping noises? Clicking noises?

Chances are that the data is gone. If the drive has broken badly enough that you can't recover anything then no data recovery utility is going to help.

Spinrite is a data recovery tool written by Steve Gibson. It is more designed to handle removable media issues where you get random bad sectors. It reads each bad sector 2000 times and tries to guess what the most probable contents of that sector is. The other features it claims are rather dubious in value if they even work.

Tell your friend to make backups next time and if he really wants the data then paying for a data recovery company is probably the only way.

tiersten

dynamik wrote: »

She keeps all her data on external USB drives with no backup. The last time she was in was because she dropped it while it was on. There was no recovery since the drive got carved up from the fall

Yeah. My friend did that. She kept all of her photos and documents on an external USB drive because she thought it'd be more reliable than the laptop. It was working okay until the day she knocked it off the table whilst it was on...

94jedi

Well, it appears the drive is in good condition, at least on the physical level. I ran the included Dell drive diagnostics and both drives pass. I'm guessing it's just the RAID config that has gotten corrupted somehow. When you boot it up, it says that the "bad" drive has an error. It doesn't actually say failed. that's the only reason I'm even tackling this project. I feel like there's still something I should be able to do.

tiersten

94jedi wrote: »

Well, it appears the drive is in good condition, at least on the physical level. I ran the included Dell drive diagnostics and both drives pass. I'm guessing it's just the RAID config that has gotten corrupted somehow. When you boot it up, it says that the "bad" drive has an error. It doesn't actually say failed. that's the only reason I'm even tackling this project. I feel like there's still something I should be able to do.

In that case then spinrite will do nothing for you. Neither will any other general data recovery utility.

If you've got a spare 600GB+ drive then you should make a backup first of both drives.

94jedi

tiersten wrote: »

In that case then spinrite will do nothing for you. Neither will any other general data recovery utility.

If you've got a spare 600GB+ drive then you should make a backup first of both drives.

and then what after the back up? Try to delete and recreate the array in the hopes that as long as the data is there and the array info is the same it will recognize the array?

kalebksp

Spinrite might work for you. I've seen it fix quite a few problems that I didn't think it would. It's non destructive, so you don't really have anything to lose, except the $100 for the program. I would give it a shot if I were you, but then again I already own it.

tiersten

kalebksp wrote: »

Spinrite might work for you. I've seen it fix quite a few problems that I didn't think it would. It's non destructive, so you don't really have anything to lose, except the $100 for the program.

It writes back to the same HD.

kalebksp

tiersten wrote: »

It writes back to the same HD.

It's pretty much impossible for it lose data. You already described how it works, so you know that it's not changing data, it is just reading it and writing it back. But you're right, I guess it's not technically non-destructive since it does write to the drive.

dynamik

You might want to put both HDs in another machine and load up something like RAID Reconstructor. I've looked at that briefly on previous occasions, but I've never used it myself. I'd be curious to see how it works for you.

94jedi

dynamik wrote: »

You might want to put both HDs in another machine and load up something like RAID Reconstructor. I've looked at that briefly on previous occasions, but I've never used it myself. I'd be curious to see how it works for you.

I have a feeling that's where I'm going to end up. I have a spinrite disc here but I have no clue how to use that utility.

dynamik

You just boot off the disc and select the partitions and what level you want it to run. It's pretty self-explanatory. However, it may move data around, which isn't a bit deal for a single drive, but that might have repercussions on a RAID disk.

tiersten

Once you've finished, shout at him again for putting valuable data on a RAID0 array.

arwes

tiersten wrote: »

Once you've finished, shout at him again for putting valuable data on a RAID0 array.

LOL I wanted to this so bad to my boss for putting our 2008 Exchange store on a SimpleTech Duo Pro drive in RAID0 instead of simply backing up to it.

94jedi

tiersten wrote: »

Once you've finished, shout at him again for putting valuable data on a RAID0 array.

oh, I will do that for sure. On top of that, I'm making him purchase and external for backups. hell, once we have the data, I might just mirror those two disks lol.