Possible to recover files in RAID?

[PeterJun21]

Couple weeks ago one of my drives in raid 0 had gone bad. I want to see if I can recover the files, my friend gave me Ontrack easy recovery to install. Has anyone tried this program? Is it bootable or do i need to install windows again on a different drive?

 

[Varun]

You can't recover files that are spanned across two drives in RAID0, because they are broken into little pieces with no parity information to reconstruct the data.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Varun
You can't recover files that are spanned across two drives in RAID0, because they are broken into little pieces with no parity information to reconstruct the data.

Of course you can. You just need to either have the drives hooked up to the same model of RAID controller, or use software that knows how to reconstruct the striping pattern.

Obviously, if one of the disks is completely *gone* (or unreadable), you've lost half of the blocks on the drive, and it's likely that a lot of your files are damaged or missing pieces.

 

[PeterJun21]

I'm really confused, I took it to geeksquad and the guy told me they couldnt do data recovery since it was done in raid 0 (only way i could recover if it was in raid 5). now my other friend who works in bestbuy geeksquad says it is possible w/ ontrack software he gave me

 

[Greenman]

Read the instructions, plug in both drives and see what happens. You have nothing to lose.

 

[Jiggz]

NO, you cannot recover from RAID 0. Even with ontrack. What you need to do is try your best to make the hdd that has gone bad to work. Either by using the freezer trick or buying an identical hdd and switching over the controller card on it. Hopefully what went wrong was not mechanical. If it was mechanical, it can still be done but it takes a lot of hard work. Unless the spindle arm already broke and scratch the hdd platter. So what was wrong with the old hdd?

Remember, as soon as you can make the old hdd work, you need to clone the entire raid to a third hdd or clone it to another RAID 0 at soon as possible.

 

[Varun]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Varun
You can't recover files that are spanned across two drives in RAID0, because they are broken into little pieces with no parity information to reconstruct the data.

Of course you can. You just need to either have the drives hooked up to the same model of RAID controller, or use software that knows how to reconstruct the striping pattern.

Obviously, if one of the disks is completely *gone* (or unreadable), you've lost half of the blocks on the drive, and it's likely that a lot of your files are damaged or missing pieces.

I'm sorry, how can hooking up both drives to the same model of RAID controller help when one of the drives died? If your stripe sizes are large enough, you may have some files kicking around on the one drive that still works but it's doubtful.

 

[amdskip]

Matthias99, raid 0 is definately non recoverable.

 

[Matthias99]

'm sorry, how can hooking up both drives to the same model of RAID controller help when one of the drives died? If your stripe sizes are large enough, you may have some files kicking around on the one drive that still works but it's doubtful.

Originally posted by: amdskip
Matthias99, raid 0 is definately non recoverable.

Obviously, if one of the drives is GONE, yes, there is nothing you can do to get those missing blocks back, and a lot of your files will be missing pieces. Most likely you'll be missing big chunks of the file allocation tables as well, so substantial data recovery is very unlikely.

If you had corruption of the filesystem, or mistakenly formatted the drive or lost the MBR or something like that, you can still get the data back just like on a single drive. You just have to plug them into a controller that can recognize the striping, or use data recovery software that can rebuild the striping pattern internally.

 

[drum]

thats one of the risks you take running raid 0. why you would do that i dunno.

 

[Varun]

Originally posted by: PeterJun21
Couple weeks ago one of my drives in raid 0 had gone bad. I want to see if I can recover the files, my friend gave me Ontrack easy recovery to install. Has anyone tried this program? Is it bootable or do i need to install windows again on a different drive?

Originally posted by: Matthias99

'm sorry, how can hooking up both drives to the same model of RAID controller help when one of the drives died? If your stripe sizes are large enough, you may have some files kicking around on the one drive that still works but it's doubtful.

Originally posted by: amdskip
Matthias99, raid 0 is definately non recoverable.

Obviously, if one of the drives is GONE, yes, there is nothing you can do to get those missing blocks back, and a lot of your files will be missing pieces. Most likely you'll be missing big chunks of the file allocation tables as well, so substantial data recovery is very unlikely.

If you had corruption of the filesystem, or mistakenly formatted the drive or lost the MBR or something like that, you can still get the data back just like on a single drive. You just have to plug them into a controller that can recognize the striping, or use data recovery software that can rebuild the striping pattern internally.

I think you forgot to read the original post Matthias.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Varun
I think you forgot to read the original post Matthias.

He didn't really define what he meant by "gone bad". If part of the file tables for the partition got corrupted, Windows would refuse to boot, but the disk itself would still be accessible and you could probably fix it with data recovery software.

Like I said, if the drive is completely dead, you probably will not be able to recover much.