Need Help :-) Question about spanned disks and recovery

[Demo]

hey,

I have a proliant 800 server with 6 IBM U160 10Ks. Am running W2k Adv Server. Drive0 (boot drive) is using onboard controller and the other 5 disks were spanned and are on an Adaptec 39160. All the drives are full. One of the drives in the span is now dead. Is there ANY way whatsoever to get any of the data off the other 4 working disks ? Windows help files say no, I am out of luck. Anyone know of anything that MS doesn't ?

 

[Woodie]

When you say spanned--you mean you did NOT raid this? From what I can remember, spanning does NOT allow for data recovery. That's the big reason I don't like it.

(I'm not an expert, just pretending to be one)

--Woodie

 

[shathal]

Sorry mate - "tough luck" is about all I can do help .

Spanning / Striping / RAID-0 is (despite its name) anything BUT a "redundant" disk-array. There's no way you can get that info back. Unless ... hmmm - I'm not too familiar with the Adaptec 39160...

Hmmm ...

... I'd try to talk to Adaptec - they might know of soemthing. I would say that the odds are 99% against you (well - I'd say as much as 99.9999%), but trying might be worth it. Also, I doubt that M$ could help you (as much as the techs there would like to).

Sorry mate - looks like you're in deep.

I hope that someone at your company would be able to learn from this to pay for RAID-controller next time - for an array with that many drives I'd go for the usual RAID-5 or so ... RAID-6 maybe if your chaps will get ultra-paranoid now.

Raid-5 *can* be software-run, but I would heavily advise against software-raid in general. For a start, if your OS is screwed, so is your info on the RAID-array. Furthermore, anything other than RAID-1 or Raid-0 takes too much of a performance hit when using SW-raid.

Sorry mate if I can't help more .

Hope someone made a recent backup of the info on that server...

 

[Demo]

Thanks for the info.

No, I did not RAID it, either software or hardware wise. I will do hardware raid when I rebuild it though.


Thanks again,