Broken RAID 0 array HELP!!!

[sptw]

Welcome to the board Rob

[zzz]

Ouch!! Guess how I got into this forum/thread? My RAID 0 in my laptop is broken!!
One of the drives failed after being frozen and shut down last night...
I almost sent my drives to data recovery for $2000 to $20000, and the recovery is NOT guaranteed!!
Dam... My wallet is not that fat at this moment... I just turned on and off the laptop to try to jump start that sick horse. Surprisingly, the array showed up on the list again after being deleted for rebuild, despite the array is still sick.
I have booted the system using WinPE. Hopefully RAID Reconstructor will get me some good news.

[zzz]

Quick update: I opened the case again. There is some kind of powder on one of the chips beneath the hard drive rack. I am not sure if this means the chip burn. Is there an external RAID controller for laptop hard drives?

[unacceptable_risk]

Probably not what your looking for, but there are these sort of things about...
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4.asp

[christophocles]

Originally Posted by zzz

Ouch!! Guess how I got into this forum/thread? My RAID 0 in my laptop is broken!!
One of the drives failed after being frozen and shut down last night...
I almost sent my drives to data recovery for $2000 to $20000, and the recovery is NOT guaranteed!!
Dam... My wallet is not that fat at this moment... I just turned on and off the laptop to try to jump start that sick horse. Surprisingly, the array showed up on the list again after being deleted for rebuild, despite the array is still sick.
I have booted the system using WinPE. Hopefully RAID Reconstructor will get me some good news.

Welp, I might be able to help... This forum was a great help to me to figure this stuff out and I actually freaking did it. Unbelievable.

What really helped me a lot was Microsoft's Resource Kit for Windows 2003 (found here). First, follow player0's post ("from sudhian") which is found on the first page of this thread. Delete your array and re-create it with the same stripe size as before. Then, go into winxp diskmgmt.msc and initialize the array and create a partition of the same size as before, but do not format. Last, carefully follow the instructions here to use ZAR and Diskprobe to restore your backup MBR.

For some background on my case, look here.

[greenmark]

I hope you guys could help me out here, mine is 2 x 250gbs western digital sata set as RAID-0, WindowXp, Asus P5nd2-sli delux motherboard.

I accidently DELETED the RAID-0 array and recreated a new RAID-0 array... I called asus CS and was told there is no way to reconstruct or create the same array once array is deleted or broken...

My RAID-0 was partitioned into 65gbs C: drive and 400gbs D: drive, after i accidently deleted and recreated I boot it up and i get black screen with "_" blinking at the top left corder of the screen...

All my files are intact, i haven't touch or alter any data on these two hard drives... I contact seagate.com data restoring team and they are charging $1200.00 to get the data recover, so that wasn't an option, and looking around for softwares that could analyze and reconstruct the RAID-0, and most of these softwares cost $500.00, I'm looking for a cheaper way to solve this problem, i had school video projects on these hard drives that i need to get it back.


From what i've read from the starting of this thread, most issue is due to broken, errors or corrupted RAID-0, I'm not sure if this apply to me, so i'm looking for confirmations, OR is there any other suggested way to REBUILD or RECREATE my or even retrieve my data from manually deleted RAID-0 array?


Thanks

[christophocles]

@greenmark

It most certainly *IS* possible to recover. Do not write ANY data to your drive until you are very sure of what you are doing. Hopefully when you re-created the array you used the same stripe size. You need to create partitions that are the *exact* same size as what they were before. Since you probably do not remember the sizes, and Windows disk manager tends to round numbers off, this may not be so easy.

The first thing that comes to my mind is browsing the empty, unpartitioned drive with DskProbe around the 65GB mark and trying to find the NTFS Backup Bootsector. Once you know the sector number where this is located you should be able to back-calculate the size and create the partition accordingly. You then simply write the backup bootsector over the new bootsector of the partition you created. You could recover C: and then move on to recovering D: in much the same way.

There may be an easier way to find the size. Unfortunately, Microsoft gives almost no instructions in how to use DskProbe or how to "traverse partition tables" as they put it. You will have to refer to 3rd party sources of information, as I did. I'll dig into this a bit more later when I have time. Google it a bit more and check my post on ubuntu forums here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/112239

Good luck

[greenmark]

unsuccessful results,


MRecover v2.01
Found a valid partition table
Total Partitions found: 1

No. Type Active Begining | Ending Size
Head Sector Cyl | Head Sector Cyl (inMB)
1 HPFS Yes 1 1 0 254 631023 67013.3

Do you want to search for partitions (Y/N)?
.
.
chose N
.
.
next screen:

The first partition is not marked as FAT32
MRECOVER will not try to recover that partition.

if you will want to try, or have accidentally selected the

wrong type of another type during Phase 1 recovery, please use

MRECOVER2 /F option to forcefully try to rcover the first

partition after marking it as FAT32.

Press enter to continue...
.
.
Should i Try MRECOVER2 /F? seem like good news, but i have two

Partitions and only one is found. eventhough, the partition is

found i does not boot into windows, i'm still getting "_"

blinking





TESTDISK v6.6
-----------------
I did not get any errors, Proceed to [ANALYSE] and chose

[Write] to write new MBR, ok

reboot with noresults, still getting "_"blinking

[greenmark]

update:
with TESTDISK v6.6 procedure, its can only see the 1st partition (65gb),

christophocles,

DskProbe, I found the window version and not sure how to use it or how it works. Is there dos version of this?

Since, you suggested to use DskProbe to search unknown range of the 1st partition, to be able to recover data, how is it down could you instruct step-by-step on how to achieve this?

as the result of MRECOVER v2.01, i can see the 1st partition how do i get data from here?

thanks

[greenmark]

I've Installed WinXP on a separate Hard Drive and trying access raid 0 and maybe recover some data from there...

1st thing i did was enter Computer Management
RightClick My Computer -> Manage -> +Storage > DiskManagement

I can see
Disk0 [Local Disk (C] 298.09GB - This is my newly boot windows disk
Disk1 [(F] 65.44GB - my corrupted Raid0 disk, with two Partitions, that is the 1st Partition, SECOND partition is marked as Unallocated and its only 167.44GB, it should have been 400GB
Disk2 Unknown 232.88GB - This disk2 should have been part of 2nd partition of Disk1 above, i don't know why are is recognized as two separate disk.

[HunterZ]

I've got a broken RAID 0 array and am wondering what I should try. The array is two 250GB Seagate SATA drives on a Silicon Image 3114R controller that is built into my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. I've had the drives disconnected for over a year and reconnected them last night. Everything was working fine until this morning when the computer locked up. I'm not sure if it was before or after I rebooted that it told me that a delayed write to the MFT had timed out. When I rebooted, the Silicon Image sub-BIOS of the Asus motherboard BIOS reports seeing both drives as a 16K striped RAID0 array, but when XP boots up the array doesn't show up. The SATARAID5 utility shows that one drive has "232.88GB Striped" and is part of a "Legacy RG 0", and that the other drive is a "232.88 GB Orphan" that is not part of the array.

Any ideas on what I should do to attempt to recover the drive? I've tried running SeaTools from a bootable CD and testdisk from WinXP but they don't recognize the drives (just my other drives) probably because the Silicon Image WinXP driver doesn't see them as an array. I'm thinking of deleting and recreating the array in the Silicon Image BIOS setup util, but I'm wondering if I'll need other tools like mrecover2 (which I can't find as all the links seem to be broken), and whether I'll have a second chance if I get the stripe order wrong (since I'm no longer sure which drive comes first due to all my fiddling).

If it matters, they're not boot drives. There was a single NTFS partition on the array.

Thanks.

[HunterZ]

Attached are some screenshots of the SATARAID5 utility.

[HunterZ]

Hmm I tried shutting down and disconnecting the data cable for the disk on Channel0, then powering back up, and it showed the disk on Channel1 as part of Striped Legacy RG 0. I then shut back down and reconnected the disconnected drive and got a boot error - a good sign because the BIOS actually recognized the array and tried to boot off of it instead of off of my actual boot drive. I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order and rebooted only to have it revert to the state in the screenshots

[unacceptable_risk]

Sorry, not my forte.. But welcome and good luck. There are ppl on here who will likely have answers for you.

[Synthohol]

a new member (the sniper) is trying to post the followingbut has no post permissions so im a proxy postin

Originally Posted by thesniper

perfect sweet. it was to ask if KODE ever recovered his data?. and If I have a broken stripe due to a mbr issue, whats the best step?. I have 2 40GB ide's configured as raid0 so 80GB and all data was stored on NTFS. Does Player0 happen to have the old files for the highpoint raid that might address the raid0 issue?.

[Player0]

Afraid I don't have any of those files for ya.

[thesniper]

Originally Posted by Player0

Afraid I don't have any of those files for ya.

darn do you know if its hosted somewhere?. I wonder if there are better apps but im willing to bet what you said in 2003 might remedy the raid 0 issue.. but if i can find those files that would be awesome . I found a floppy disk my dad luckily never threw away the motherboard. And luckily i still have the 2 drives. As long as i can get the data off thats all im looking to do

[thesniper]

Originally Posted by thesniper

darn do you know if its hosted somewhere?. I wonder if there are better apps but im willing to bet what you said in 2003 might remedy the raid 0 issue.. but if i can find those files that would be awesome . I found a floppy disk my dad luckily never threw away the motherboard. And luckily i still have the 2 drives. As long as i can get the data off thats all im looking to do

ok so i found mrecover2 i wonder if theres anything else i need?. I have 1 floppy disk. I need to find a few more just incase i need to use more than 1 floppy

[Player0]

I don't know, I had a hell of a time finding a couple years ago. I ended up using another method, but I don't remember any of that. I sort of remember looking for these files myself without any luck. Maybe there's another thread here on it.

[thesniper]

Originally Posted by Player0

I don't know, I had a hell of a time finding a couple years ago. I ended up using another method, but I don't remember any of that. I sort of remember looking for these files myself without any luck. Maybe there's another thread here on it.

yeah I think at this point I just need the highpoint recovery utility. i know it uses a 370 / 372 chipset, but its so damn legacy I dont know if there's any crap out there. I wish I ranted and asked for help back in 2003 when the damn problem happened. Now i feel like a dumbass waiting all these years to read up and find out someone else was on the same boat but doesnt respond if he was or was not able to recover that effin raid array or not!. lol