New PSU, Dead RAID.

[Streckfus]

PC froze up on me last night, so I turned the sucker off and attempted a cold boot. Dead as a doornail. Wouldn't start at all. Figured it could be the PSU, mobo or the actual power switch.

Borrowed a friend's PSU, hooked it up, started right up. All clear? Nope.

Once it came back to life, my RAID 0 array wasn't showing up in Windows. Used the Silicon Image raid controller to set it up, probably a year ago, no problems until now. And I've got about 750GB of VERY important data stored on the two SATA drives. Data that I was going to back up, right up until Windows lost sight of it. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Upon startup, half the time it only recognizes one of the two drives, then when it does recognize the other drive, it's name is all garbled. Every once in a while, it recognizes both hard drives and lists them correctly, and enthusiastically informs me that "RAID 0 SET" and commences with Windows startup. And when I get to Windows, the raid array is nowhere to be found.

Even during startup, when both drives are listed correctly, I'll go into the RAID Utility and it'll list each drive correctly, stating that the logical drive is 1TB - so one would assume that from the controller's standpoint, the array is ready to rock and all data is accounted for.

Went into the Device Manager, says the Silicon RAID Controller is functional, installed properly, etc.

Went into Administrative Tools to the Disk Management area....RAID isn't listed among my hard drives.

So, I'm thinking that one of my hard drives might be shot, in which case - is there a way to retrieve any of the data?

Otherwise, is there a step that I'm missing? I have no idea why the RAID isn't working anymore, and everything is connected/powered correctly, so....???

Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
Silicon Image 3114 onboard controller
2 Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA HD
(1st one always lists as ST3500630AS)

Any help/insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Streckfus
So, I'm thinking that one of my hard drives might be shot, in which case - is there a way to retrieve any of the data?

As you likely realize, in a RAID 0 array, half of the data bits are on each drive. This makes the bulk of the data unrecoverable if one of the drives fails and can't be repaired or imaged.

Your description matches a physical failure of a hard drive.

Bear in mind that if the data is REALLY valuable and irreplaceable, I suggest calling a company that specializes in recovery of damaged hard drives and RAID arrays. This is NOT cheap.

If the recovery will cost more than you are willing to pay, then label all connections and drives, remove one drive at a time, and test it using the the drive maker's diagnostics program. DON'T attempt any repairs on the drive at this time. I suggest a QUICK test, since the more the drive is used, the more likely it'll totally fail.

Once you've determined whether you have a hardware or simply a logical failure, you can go from there.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: Streckfus
PC froze up on me last night, so I turned the sucker off and attempted a cold boot. Dead as a doornail. Wouldn't start at all. Figured it could be the PSU, mobo or the actual power switch.

Borrowed a friend's PSU, hooked it up, started right up. All clear? Nope.

Once it came back to life, my RAID 0 array wasn't showing up in Windows. Used the Silicon Image raid controller to set it up, probably a year ago, no problems until now. And I've got about 750GB of VERY important data stored on the two SATA drives. Data that I was going to back up, right up until Windows lost sight of it. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

This should be stickied for all to see who believe RAID 0 is the way to go..

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: ch33zw1z

Originally posted by: Streckfus
PC froze up on me last night, so I turned the sucker off and attempted a cold boot. Dead as a doornail. Wouldn't start at all. Figured it could be the PSU, mobo or the actual power switch.

Borrowed a friend's PSU, hooked it up, started right up. All clear? Nope.

Once it came back to life, my RAID 0 array wasn't showing up in Windows. Used the Silicon Image raid controller to set it up, probably a year ago, no problems until now. And I've got about 750GB of VERY important data stored on the two SATA drives. Data that I was going to back up, right up until Windows lost sight of it. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

This should be stickied for all to see who believe RAID 0 is the way to go..

No problem with it if its used for storing temp data. I have a friend that does video editing and he works on a project on a raid 0 array and then moves it to a more secure location once hes done

 

[Streckfus]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer

Originally posted by: ch33zw1z

Originally posted by: Streckfus
PC froze up on me last night, so I turned the sucker off and attempted a cold boot. Dead as a doornail. Wouldn't start at all. Figured it could be the PSU, mobo or the actual power switch.

Borrowed a friend's PSU, hooked it up, started right up. All clear? Nope.

Once it came back to life, my RAID 0 array wasn't showing up in Windows. Used the Silicon Image raid controller to set it up, probably a year ago, no problems until now. And I've got about 750GB of VERY important data stored on the two SATA drives. Data that I was going to back up, right up until Windows lost sight of it. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

This should be stickied for all to see who believe RAID 0 is the way to go..

No problem with it if its used for storing temp data. I have a friend that does video editing and he works on a project on a raid 0 array and then moves it to a more secure location once hes done

Yup. That's what the RAID was used for...an independent movie I shot and edited. I figured that it was a fairly inexpensive way to get the TB of storage I needed for such a large video project, and it was my intention to have it backed up....but the failure beat me to it.

What's weird is that everything worked fine up until the PC locked up on me and the PSU apparently failed....but perhaps that caused the HD failure if that's indeed what happened.

Luckily my sound editor has copies of the audio files and I have the color corrected video on a couple of DVCAM tapes, so I suppose I could always recapture the material and piece it together again.

Thanks for the feedback thus far....any other suggestions/ideas let me know. (I've heard that data recovery can cost $850 for a 40GB hard drive....so I'm already guessing that recovering 750GB is gonna be a little out of my budget.)

Haven't had a Seagate drive fail on me yet....figures something like this would be the first occurrence.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Streckfus
Haven't had a Seagate drive fail on me yet....figures something like this would be the first occurrence.

ALL hard drives fail, eventually. It's a high-speed electro-mechanical device. Some fail earlier than others. Because of their construction, RAID 0 arrays fail twice as fast as any other array.

Never keep valuable data on a single drive or single array.

 

[Laputa]

Yup. A simple good backup strategy of the most critical file will save people lots of headache. The irony is that how many of us are backing up daily or do we ever think about what that data loss would impact us when data loss strikes:B We then panic. Survey shows pretty much 80% of the business will fail after loosing their important data. That's why we need RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 50, etc. But even those best RAID will fail one way or the other. And that's why we need tapes as a secondary backup or another RAID to mirrior the data. A RAID-0 really means your luck is out and you are likely to loose everything if one of the disk suffered a major disc surface scrape damage. When that happens, I doubt if anybody can put dust back to data in a readable form. In this case, it's still possible to get the data back, but likely expensive.

The drives likely suffered firmware damages and/or possibly some sort of physical surface issues. Clean room is likely, but that may not be all necessary. Send you a good referal info if that can help you out.