Raid Recovery...when Raid 0 fails

Good day to the ladies and gents of Anti-Online.

I have had to learn the hard way about the drawbacks of raid 0. Today I come into work and see a blue screen on my monitor. I shut off my computer and turn it back on after letting it sit for a minute. As it starts up I notice a message that the second hard drive in this array now lists itself as a non-raid disk. The status of the raid array is 'failed' and it says it is not bootable, because only one harddrive lists itself as a member disk of the array and raid 0 cannot function without both the drives.

This has got me pretty angry at myself since I never did a full back-up and after talking to those oh so smart people at Dell they want me to wipe it all and start over again to fix this issue and recreate the array. Apparently they don't seem to understand that I have important info on their I would rather not loose. I have been searching all over to find a solution that won't cost me an arm and a leg. When running diagnostics on the hard drives I got one bit of good news. The drives both pass the diagnostic tests, niether one is broken and the real problem seems that the array has become disjoined.

My question to you is how can I fix this? Is it possible to get the two hard drives back together again? Is all lost and my only solution to go to the nearest data recovery store and shell out thousands of bucks to get back my hard drive content? Does anyone have a good solution or at least some things I can attempt to do before I kick the proverbial bucket on this hard drive thing? As always your help is greatly appreciated.

This seems to happen every now and then.. I've had it happen on several brands..
If you're lucky you just need to recreate the raid array.. And everything might work again.

If there's really a drive failing.. Well, good luck :eek:

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Apparently they don't seem to understand that I have important info on their I would rather not loose.

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They do.

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This has got me pretty angry at myself since I never did a full back-up

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So.. Apparently it's really important but you've never made a backup :confused:

You should be angry at yourself, not at the people from Dell.

I am angry at myself. However the computer is less than 6 months old. I guess I should have done it from day 1. But that is niether here nor there. Anyone have another solution that might help me bring these hard drives back together?

As I said, try recreating the array. It happend a couple of times to me too. Different brands, different hardware, same problem. The array config seems to disappear, probably due to some glitch when checking one of the drives. After retesting, all drives seem ok. Recreated the array and rebooted. Worked 9 out of 10 times.

NB Harddrives tend to die at the worst possible moment. It may take a week, it may take 10 years. It'll happen sooner or later ;)

I have tried using the built in controller to recreate the array. It tells me their is not enough space to do it. Are there any other tools I can use that would work. The only options I can do is to reset or delete (both if I assume correctly will erase all my data). Not sure why recreating the array wouldn't work, but it just keeps tell me that it has insufficient space. Thanks for the ideas though. Keep em comin'.

You might try this tool:

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

It costs, but it doesn't mess with the data, just reads it and reconstructs it someplace else. You really shouldn't install software and attempt to recover data onto a drive that has gone south anyway IMO..................to much risk of further overwriting and corruption?

:)

Thanks for the idea. I had looked into this, but hadn't bought it. The computer that has the messed up array will not get any farther than the screen where it recognizes that one of the drives is no longer part of the array. So all I get is a message that says array failed and then it can't boot so it stops at that screen and asks if I want to try and boot again. I currently am using a spare computer, but all the software I install on this tries to help repair this computer. I wish there was a boot disk that would diag. and run a repair on the raided drives and link them together again. It seems like this software from Run Time is a way to go, but has anyone used it before?

I haven't used it personally but I have had pretty good reports about it, and I believe that you can run it from a boot disk (CD).

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Originally posted here by Blunted One
The only options I can do is to reset or delete (both if I assume correctly will erase all my data). Not sure why recreating the array wouldn't work, but it just keeps tell me that it has insufficient space. Thanks for the ideas though. Keep em comin'.

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IIRC it doesn't really delete any "physical" data, just the array config. The reason it has insufficient space is because on the other drive there's still part of an array. Remove all arrays and recreate them.

Hmmm,

I agree that these things do "happen" from time to time, and normally I would do exactly what SirDice suggests. However we would both have full backups to rely upon? ;)

That is why I suggested what I would consider to be a somewhat safer (albeit more expensive) solution. Particularly as I do not know what caused the problem in the first instance.

The problem with most conventional tools is that because the array is broken, they will not be able to match all the parts of your files which will be distributed across both drives.

I must admit that I have never been in this position, as RAID0 is even more vulnerable than a single drive, and I would consider backups to be absolutely essential.

I guess at the very least I would look for some sort of passive disk cloning tool, so that I would have a second chance if things went wrong?''

I guess it all depends on just how important those data are, and how much of a risk taker you are? :)

As Nihil said you should take an image of th disk/clone and then try on the clone, all the tools suggested.

All said and done it depends on the criticality of the data you have on the disk.

So would I be right in assuming that resetting the raid disk to non-raid will not erase the data on it? (when going through the reset option it warns me that all data will be lost. Not a very encouraging warning.

I have talked to the people at runtime and they said that their program will move all the data from the two drives to a single drive. If none of the files on either hard drive are damaged they believe it will work and boot up fine and I will have all the data on a single drive. Is this plausible or are the properties of raid 0 too hard to predict and therefore I may loose chunks of data? Anyone every had any experiance in this area and had good results?

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Originally posted here by nihil
Hmmm,

I agree that these things do "happen" from time to time, and normally I would do exactly what SirDice suggests. However we would both have full backups to rely upon? ;)

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I hate to admit it but I don't really have any backups at home. I'm still looking for a cheap solution for backing up a couple of hundred gigs :eek:

The "backup" solution I currently use is to scatter my files over different harddisks on different machines. :rolleyes: The odd chance 2 drives burning out at the same time with the exact same files on them are astronomical (but not impossible)

I have reset and recreated the raid drives and I get a new status message that everything is normal and that it is bootable. However it tells me after that there is no boot device availible. Does anyone know what might have happened? Is all my data basically gone or is there something I forgot to do or a way to extract the data?

Yes, SirDice , I too tend to "take the moral high ground" insofar as there are a lot of machines I do no more than save files to a rewritable CD or DVD, and move stuff to other machines. :D

I guess it is a case of "do what I say, not what I do" ;)

Mind you, to have 20 Gig would be the maximum for me :D

So I have continued to try and resolve this issue and ran into another issue. When trying to run the windows XP cd to repair/reinstall windows on the hard drives I got the following message after the initial blue screen where it loads up the windows component for install....

Stop: C0000221 unknown hard error
\systemroot\system32\ntdll.dll

anyone have any idea what this means? I am gonna do some research on it, but thought I would post and update to this thread just to see if anything knows what this error is.

Hmmm, you'd probably need a floppy or something with the RAID drivers when installing XP?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

support.microsoft.com my friends...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/101096/en-us

Just curious.. but I am wondering if you took the harddrive that isn't listed on the RAID, and set it as a SLAVE drive using the cable & jumper, if you wouldn't be able to mount it, back up the information, then format & do another RAID config? I'm not entirely sure if this is possible or not.. but it was just an idea. Worth giving it a shot. If it does work, you won't lose your data. If not, you've wasted 15mins. =/ lol.

Maybe as a backup solution, you can do a Raid 01. Disks these days are getting cheaper and cheaper. If you don't want to dish out several hundred dollars for a tape drive that would accomidate the data, then buying 2 more drives should be too bad. That way, if your array fails, it can fail over to the good array. During that time, you can just replace the bad disks, initialize, repair, and back to normal.

That is if you want to go that route. I have a Adaptec 2810sa controller and have my system partition raid 1 and my data partition on a raid 5.

Good luck with whatever you do.

Enforcer

/off topic slightly:

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and after talking to those oh so smart people at Dell they want me to wipe it all and start over again to fix this issue and recreate the array

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Funny you should mention that - one of my users phoned me the other dy to say his PC wont boot, I tried all the usual stuff but to no effect......found out I had a next business day support contract with Dell for that machine so phoned them up and palmed it off on to them.

The machine is 200 miles away from where I work from so I gave Dell the users phone number to contact as they always like to run through their own diagnosticts before sending an engineer out..............................long story short - I get an MSN message from the user "I'm on the phone to Dell and he has told me to format the hard drive and is going to talk me through it, is there a Windows XP CD handy anywhere?" :eek:

I sat there gob-smacked for a few minutes before telling him to hang up on the so called Dell tech support! I couldnt believe that a Dell engineer would format the hard drive of a commercial work station just like that - without asking anyone what data was on it etc etc!!

I took some perverse pleasure logging a complaint with em!

/sorry, back on topic :D

About the dead array is the hard drive dead? Ether way you need to do data recovery on each disk on a second computer. Their several programs for this one I have used is File Scavenger 3 it will do raids not all programs will. Hope this helps, also for the couple hundred gigs of data try http://www.streamload.com they have unlimited data storage and you pay for monthly download banwith like 25 Gb per month for $10. :D

Heh,
An old lady (a school principal) who I know called Dell for support because she couldn't install Office. The install failed with some wierd error. The Dell guy took her through formatting the computer, only to eventually find out that the Office media was bad :D .

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Of course buying another drive and going to raid 5 would have prevented this.

even better going to scsi would be a better choice for a raid setup, ide/sata just don't cut it

Charlie~


You are talking total crap....... SCSI/SATA/IDE............. I can say with absolute certainty that I have forgotten more about them than you will ever know:D

We are talking RAID ARRAYS here?

There is a slight difference IMHO?

:rolleyes: