Broken Array?

[Nomad64]

My machine has 2 WD 80GB drives in it set to run in RAID 0 via a RocketRAID 133 card.

I came home from work this evening and did a bit of work on my computer, after which I restarted. Up until the restart, I had no problems, and was even listening to music.

Upon the restart, the RocketRAID card setup screen popped up, and said that my RAID 0 Array was broken because of a failed Hard Drive. I restarted, still didn't work. I checked all of the power connections as well as the ATA cable connections on the drives as well as on the card, still no go.

This strikes me as odd because I haven't heard any unusual clicking at all, nor have I had any read/write errors due to HD problems. Also, I built this rig in May, so the drives are not that old.

What would be a select course of action? I haven't attempted the freezer trick yet, and I have a few files that I would like to get off of they array as well. Then again, I don't even know which drive has failed.

I don't have to get up early tomorrow, so I am going to work on this for a while yet, and see if I can get it to work. Any suggestions?

[Kabooka]

check this thread - http://www.liquidninjas.com/bbs/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5186

[Nomad64]

Ok, when I run the program MRECOVR2, I get up to where the program is searching for a partition chain, when it starts searching, it hangs, and eventually produces this message: "Error 187 reading block at head 0 sector 1 cylinder 1. Press any key to Continue..."

That sounds like a dead drive to me... :(

I am going to toss the drive into the freezer and try again later in the morning.

[Player0]

You can usually only recover a stripe if it dies because of software reasons. A dead drive hardware wise will be impossible to repair.

Freezer?? A freezer can certainly do damage to a hard drive. If its a humid day, you will get condensate to form inside the drive, which could be bad for things. Why would you put it in the freezer? It will also make the bearing fluid and the vibration isolation pistons completely solid, which will make the drive extremely susceptable to damage. If you think the stepper motor is over heating, freezing the drive will only provide about 15-20 seconds of coolness to the motor, which will run just as hot after that time.

What you might want to do however is run something like Norton Disk Doctor or Western Digital's hard drive utility and scan/verify the media. If there are bad sectors on the drive, say the boot sectors, the utilities will flag them and move the sectors elsewhere on the drive. Then you can try MRECOVR

[WesM63]

Hey Nomad,
Just sounds like a bad drive. Get a new one.

We only use the freezer trick if we know the drives toast and need some data off it. Even at that, we don't get much and they don't last long after that.

Good Luck M8.