RAID Problem - A good one.

Thermaltke

Thermaltke

Joined
Aug 22, 2004
Messages
244
Reaction score
0
Recently I shut my computer down for the first time in about 3 days and when I came to boot it up, I got an error message "problem with RAID configuration" giving me three options:

Check disk
Delete JBOD configuration
Continue to boot.

I selected continue to boot the first time, to see if I could see any driver or "VIA" problems myself. But the VIA tool showed no problems, and the hardware list still had my array on it. Even though My computer was showing no "F:" drive. I tried a data recovery program from softpedia, which was not sucessfull.

I rebooted, and tried checking the disks on the top option, which froze my computer after giving me the message "not supported" or something similar. So I rebooted and went to "continue to boot" and went back to the hardware list, but when I refreshed it, the array was no longer there. VIA was still reporting "OK" on both the drives in the array, but nothing else was responding.

After a reboot I tried to continue to boot again but this time I had another message appear in DOS: "Doing this will mean all of the configurations, data, and relations on the disks will be DISTROYED".

My pc wont boot up with both of the Drives plugged in any more, so theres not much chance of me recovering data in windows.

My original configuration is as follows:

1x 40gb WD drive for windows and drivers,
2x 80gb Maxtor drives on RAID-0 for everything else, including alot of files i need for next saturday.

Sorry to babble on, but i'm really going to need help. I am hoping my only option is not to reformat and hope recovery software can grab the files I need (approx 5gig of media files)...

Thanks for any help you can give, and if any more info is needed I can supply it.
Harry.
 
Thermaltke

Unfortunately I'm not sure what the problem could be, but I would suggest the way to get your data is to grab another hard drive and load Windows. then you can attach each of the other drives in turn to copy off any data. You will also be able to run scandisk on each drive and also use any recovery software you have without overwriting anything on the suspect drives.

Covenant
 
This method should work I know, but some of the programs i've tried have all failed. I'm afraid that all the data is lost. I'm currently working on getting it all back the hard way. But i'm not giving up hope on trying to recover the original data, thankyou for the suggestion, i'll keep trying.
 
As your 2 storage drives are in Raid 0, the data is broken into stripes or chunks and spread over both drives - therefore if one has failed, you are going to be unable to recover any data.

Personally I wouldn't recommend using data storage drives in a raid 0 array for that precise reason.

Raid 0 is fine for OS or programs which you can re-install easily, but not suitable for storage of important data.
 
I'm kinda pleased Adywebb said that, I was going to but I didn't have the heart :(

Truth is, I think you've lost the data.

There really is very little point in using RAID 0 for backup.
 
I mostly used it for storage so yeah, pretty screwed up, it's no problem really, just would have been nice to have the data back ;) Anyhoo, just got my brand spanking new laptop through, it's gorgeous. So i'm happy about that. I'll leave some downloads and updates and transfers running tonight to get some of my missing data back :)

Cheers guys. x
 
Back
Top