HELP! Hard drive crash; RAID volume, important files needing recovery!!!

[FyreLance]

As a last resort, trying to see if any of my fellow geeks have any ideas on recovering my drive....

Somewhat recently I backed up my boot drive, formatted and reinstalled Windows, and then reconfigured my boot drive to be two 40GB drives in an IDE RAID 0 (striping) configuration. Well, lucky me, looks like one of the drives must've died, because the machine would no longer boot. Unfortunately I had not gotten a backup yet (I JUST set this up). So after trying to get the thing going for a while (without success), I installed Windows (XP) on another drive in my system ("Storage") and booted the machine. Now the RAID volume shows up, as "Local Disk ( G: )", but when I try to open it, it says "G:\ is not accessible. The device is not connected." The drive does not show up in the disk manager.

I tried to run OnTrack EasyRecovery software to see if that would help, but whenever I select any of the recovery utilities, the program quits, before I even tell it what drive to look at. Both the full version and trial version do this.

Checking "Properties" on the drive shows Used and Free space at 0 bytes, capacity 0 bytes, file system RAW. Trying to Error-Check the drive does nothing at all. Checking the hardware tab reveals "This device is working properly."

I am running out of ideas, and I am afraid to touch or remove the drives, because once the RAID array is gone from this machine, there is absolutely no chance of recovering my data (not that things are looking hopeful anyway...)

Does anyone have ANY suggestions? Luckily my massive music collection is safe (different drive), but if I lose this data, all of my work files from music I've composed, GIGABYTES of pictures, videos, important documents, all of my e-mail since 2001, saved conversations since late 90's... all will be gone. Obviously RAID 0 scares the crap out of me now and I should've known better to get a backup sooner, but I kept putting it off, and just as I was thinking to get ready to do it, the machine decides to crap out.

The RAID controller is an IDE HPT374 on my Abit AT7 motherboard.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!!

 

[FyreLance]

I think I'm gonna give this a shot next: http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

Anybody have any experience with it?

 

[FyreLance]

Currently I'm using a demo of Active@ UNDELETE which is supposed to be able to recover data from lost RAID arrays. I currently have it doing a low-level scan which will probably take ~6 hours. Then it will try and recover anything that is 64kb or smaller (demo limitation, should be enough to tell if it will work). If it works, I'll probably go ahead and buy the program (~$35) and try to recover everything.

 

[BadThad]

Good luck. Because of the nature of RAID 0, when one of the drives fails you're basically screwed.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: FyreLance
I think I'm gonna give this a shot next: http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

Anybody have any experience with it?

I've never used that, however I have used R-studio, though not for RAID recovery. It's got a demo version; download it and give it a try. It does let you create virtual RAID drives or something to that effect, for possible recovery of lost arrays.

 

[FyreLance]

Will have a look, thanks!!

 

[JDCentral]

lol... FyreLance... NEVER STRIPE YOUR DRIVES!!!!!

Unless you're willing to lose everything... Striping is EXTREMELY hard to recover, as many chipsets do the striping differently, or don't follow the RAID 0 specifications exactly.

If you get your data back, please let me know how!

(I just spent three days with a guy who had all of his data on a striped RAID array... one HD crashed and he lost everything.)

 

[DSLHunta]

Similiar situation here. I have a system that is my W2K3 file server lock up on me. I rebooted my system and to my dismay my raid volume now shows up as unkonwn/unintialized in disk management. I have the onboard Highpoint 370 controller on my Abit motherboard. Please let me know if you manage to recover the raid volume!!!!

 

[stevty2889]

I was able to repair and recover data from a raid-0 array using testdisk 5.3. If one of the drives is dead thats a differant story, but I moved my raid array from one controller to another and managed to get all my data. I've even used testdisk to recover partitions from drives that had already been re partitioned and written over.

 

[imported_Phil]

If you've lost a drive, the data is gone. Don't bother wasting your time trying to get it back.

This is why you don't use RAID-0 for anything other than heavily-redundant storage space, or scratch space.

 

[NotquiteanooB]

My first attempt at Raid some years ago was Raid 0. After a HD died, I never used Raid 0 again. Now I use Raid 1 and still do backups every week. I didn't lose much when the Raid 0 crapped out. I had done a backup the day before.

As I say in my sig: Blessed be the Pessimist; for he hath made backups.