faulty raid0

[issar]

system
Motherboard GA-K8N-SLi 29 °C (84 °F)
CPU 3200+ 70 °C (158 °F)
NVIDIA nForce4 SATA RAID Controller
WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 64 °C (147 °F)
WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 66 °C (151 °F)
WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 49 °C (120 °F)
WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 39 °C (102 °F)
pci SiI 3112 SATARaid Card
Maxtor 6Y120M0 52 °C (126 °F)


Mysystem completely crashed last week, I tried 50 differnt times to get windows to boot from the SiI 3112 with the 120gb. In the end i disconected the 4 hdd raid and connected the 120 dive to the nvidia controler installed xp and returned it to the SiI 3112.I reconnected the 4 hdds to the mb (I have 2 hardware raid0 on a GA-K8N-SLI (512), connected by software to form one 1tb disk).In the bios it wrote on the second raid raid-group apears "unhealthy". in windows when the bios is set as no raid one drive appears unallocated

my guess is sometime during the many trials af re-installing windows on the 120 sata some data was written on one of the 250gb raid-disks instead of the 120 disk.

1) Is there any sort of disk-doctor or something similiar that can repair the raid group?

2) what will happen if i try to import only half of the software raid (qroup 1 hardware raid will it be possible to accses some of the files or is it iddentical to hardware raid


p.s. is the Temperatures dangerously high?:

 

[hammong]

Got a good backup, right?

Your array is now in an invalid state, and there is no way to get it back and keep the data intact. Since you're running RAID 0 - there is no parity or data integrity on the stripes for a utility to pick apart and rebuild.

I'd venture a guess that the reason you have a failure is those astronomically high drive temperatures. Those 150+ degree F temps are going to cause big problems in the long run.

 

[Mondoman]

hammong, remember that he said the 4 drives had been set up as *two* RAID 0 arrays, which were then joined into one virtual TB disk using some unspecified software. I would expect that one of the two RAID 0 arrays is still intact (but may not have a complete functional filesystem, depending on how the software join was implemented). Thus, I would expect that if you just install each 2-drive RAID 0 by itself, one will be "healthy" according to the RAID controller. It may or may not be recognized as a drive by Win, but you should at least be able to use some disk tools on it and recover the data that was on it.

 

[issar]

i didn't backup
I had almost a terra of irreplaceable info (photos ...)
isnt there any way to fix the raid or accsess the drive

 

[Mondoman]

Well, at least you won't use RAID 0 w/o backup next time.
Based on your posting, it seems you are totally out of your depth here, and anything you try to do personally has a good chance of just making things worse. Here's my guess as to the current status of your data:
1) 1/2 is fine, just hard to get to. This is the data on the one pair of RAID 0 drives that presumably hasn't been touched. It's hard to get to only because it was part of a software join with the other pair of RAID 0 drives. This should be quite easy for a professional to recover intact.
2) Part (most) of the other half should also be OK, just harder to get to. This is the "intact" part of one drive in the "bad" RAID 0, along with its corresponding other half on the other drive. This will be trickier to recover, but still should be relatively straightforward for a professional to recover intact.
3) Any part that has been overwritten is most likely gone. There ARE some extreme physical methods that might be able to recover some/all of the overwritten part (essentially by looking for faint magnetic "ghosts" of the previous data), but they are VERY expensive and time-consuming.

Thus, it's time for you to contact some data-recovery professionals and get estimates of what they can recover and how much it will cost you. My guess is that part 1 above may only be a few hundred $, part 3 would be thousands, and I'm not sure about part 2.