Recovering data from a (possible?) raid 0 array

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danageis

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Apr 23, 2014
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Hi, so I have a bit of a strange problem, and please keep in mind that I have tried my best to research this but I have never before worked directly with any raid arrays:

Recently a friend's Alienware M18x laptop motherboard died, and instead of replacing it I convinced him to let me build him a desktop gaming machine. His one caveat was that we be able to transfer some data from the laptop to the new build.

I thought this would be easy, simply connecting a 2.5' drive into a sata port and copying files over. However, when I opened up the laptop there were two 750gb hard drives in it. I have been unable to find too much in regards to exact specs for his old PC, but from what I have gathered I think that the disks were installed in a raid 0 configuration (he says they always showed up as one drive in Windows, and looking online I think that drives in raid 0 was an offering by Alienware for that laptop).

Having never worked with raid, my question is what is the easiest way to recover his data?

I have read in other forums that it may be possible to read the array with a linux live disk? I have some experience working with linux and would be willing to try that, but I was under the impression that that would only work if it was a software raid implementation.

To be honest I don't think I am 100% clear on the difference between a hardware or software implementation either, and I have no idea if there was some sort of raid controller interface present on the laptop mobo (the 2 drives were connected together with a small PCB connected via ribbon cable directly to the motherboard).

I hope all of that makes sense, I appreciate any advice/help you all can give me, and will try to provide any other information that might help. Thanks.

 
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True Hardware RAID means that there is hardware (usually mounted on a separate board) consisting of a processor, some RAM for it to use, a BIOS ROM chip containing the code for doing the RAID work, and a controller chip to control the HDD units attached to this board. In a desktop computer this is most often mounted in a PCIe slot, and the OS has to have a device driver for that device installed in order to use the RAID array it manages. I know that very few desktops come built this way with an extra RAID card already mounted in a PCIe slot. By far the majority of desktops put the coding for RAID management into the main mobo BIOS chip and let the main CPU do all the work. This consumes system resources and thus slows the machine down a...
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Paperdoc

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True Hardware RAID means that there is hardware (usually mounted on a separate board) consisting of a processor, some RAM for it to use, a BIOS ROM chip containing the code for doing the RAID work, and a controller chip to control the HDD units attached to this board. In a desktop computer this is most often mounted in a PCIe slot, and the OS has to have a device driver for that device installed in order to use the RAID array it manages. I know that very few desktops come built this way with an extra RAID card already mounted in a PCIe slot. By far the majority of desktops put the coding for RAID management into the main mobo BIOS chip and let the main CPU do all the work. This consumes system resources and thus slows the machine down a bit, but is quite cheap. This is what is called "Software RAID" - it uses software added to the BIOS, but no added hardware. There is an intermediate form also. Some cheap RAID cards are in fact only the software part and the controller chips on the added board, and they use the main CPU and RAM on the mobo to do all the work. This also is "Software RAID". In all cases, a software driver is required by the OS to access the RAID array.

I don't know exactly what was in your friend's Alienware laptop, but there's a good chance it was a software RAID system using code in its BIOS and mainboard system hardware.

The real dilemma is that there is no "standard" way to do RAID. Thus the data written on the old pair of HDD's is in a form that is unique to that RAID system, whether it was hardware or software RAID. The only sure way to be able to read their data is to connect them to the SAME RAID control system (most commonly, the same mobo and BIOS) as was used to write it. But that is not possible in your case.

I understand there are utility packages that run under some forms of Linux that claim to know most of the variations on how RAID is done, and hence CAN read a pair of old RAID0 disks because they can analyze their contents and deduce exactly which RAID algorithms were use to write them. Thus they can copy the data to another HDD - preferably, NOT another RAID array. I have never used such a tool, so I cannot advise where to look and which is best. Hopefully someone who does have real experience will post better info for you here.
 
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Julius_01

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Raid 0 means the data gets split over 2 separate SSD's/HDD's, so you get twice the reading/writing speed. If one SSD is broken there is no way to recover any of his other data. Otherwise you can just copy the data and put it on a separate drives. Just use a sata cable to connect both of them. And the fastest (and safest) way to manage his drives is with RAID 10 (for the desktop).
 
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danageis

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Apr 23, 2014
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Thanks for the replies!

I hadn't realized raid using the Mobo was considered software, I was under the impression software raid only meant using the os to sort raid, thank you. I will have to look into some more recovery options.

As far as the second answer, I am aware how raid 0 striping works and from everything I've read you should NEVER just plug in two drives in an array to a new system...
 
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Paperdoc

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OP, you are mostly correct about plugging RAID units containing data into a new system. There should not be a problem IF you are VERY sure never to WRITE to that array. BUT sometimes errors happen, and sometimes even the computer hardware itself will initiate "corrective" steps. The danger, of course, is that unless the new system does RAID exactly as the old system did, you can destroy some or all of your data.

In your case, the safest way would be to use a data recovery tool specifically for multiple versions of RAID. Such tools almost always will NOT write to the "troubled" disks - they will only read them and offer to write recovered data to a DIFFERENT data storage device.
 
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danageis

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Success! So I just wanted to update this thread in case some one else comes along and needs advice, thank you all for the help and advice.

In the end, the way we got it working was just by plugging them in!

I had installed his new system with a raid 1array on 2 data disks, so raid was already set up for the as rock Mobo. All I did was plug in the drives, and the mobo raid utility picked it up as a raid 0 array!

I am very impressed by the fact that the Mobo raid controller picked up another raid array created by another (mobile even) Intel system that was over 2 years old. Reading online, this is becoming more common as a lot of Intel chipsets handle raid similarly? That is great news for me, and if anybody else is having a similar issue I would just plug it into a new Intel Mobo and see if it reads the disks.
 
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