Raid Recovery

[TrueTenacity]

I have 2x 160GB Hard drives connected to the SIL 3114 raid controller on my main board...

I put them into a raid 0 array and they've been working wonderfully for over a year now...

but i have encountered a problem, my mainboard has failed, out of warranty of course, and now i just want to find out if there is any way to recover the data on the array?

 

[mkaibear]

The easiest thing to do is just recover the data from the backups you've been taking because you have a RAID 0...

Seriously, you may be able to recover it by getting a card or motherboard with a SIL 3114 on it, and setting up the RAID in exactly the same way...

 

[Julian33]

You'd think there would be some software out there that would allow you to recover the data, provided you knew the configuration details such as stripe size :?

 

[TrueTenacity]

now that would make life easy.... you know we can't have that... :-D

but still a damn nice idea...

 

[sruane]

The data is still there. Plug the drives into another board.

 

[lafontma]

It is possible. You will need 3 drives (an extra to copy the rebuild data).

Plug all 3 drives on the 2 IDE controllers of a other motherboard. Boot off a CD like UBCD or from a 4th drive. Use File Recovery program (at work at the moment or I would tell you the one I use)

You need to know the size of the blocks in order to get the data back.. It happened to me on a MSI motherboard and I manage to get all the data back.

Cheers

 

[SomeJoe7777]

You happen to be in luck. I did a test for the sake of testing this weekend that will work perfectly for you.

RAID Reconstructor is made by the same people who make GetDataBack for NTFShttp://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm. To test it this weekend, I did the following:
[*:a772543d69]Set up a RAID-0 using 2x Maxtor 250GB drives on a Promise FastTrack TX2000 (IDE).
[*:a772543d69]Partitioned and Formatted a 20GB NTFS partition.
[*:a772543d69]Copied about 12GB of data to the array. It consisted of 534 folders containing 5504 files. There was a mixture of large (~1GB DVD .vob files) and small (~200K or less .pdf files).
[*:a772543d69]Disconnected the drives from the Promise card, removed it.
[*:a772543d69]Installed a generic 2-channel IDE card (no RAID capability). This was a SIIG Ultra-133 card.
[*:a772543d69]Connected both drives formerly used in the RAID to the Ultra-133 card.
[*:a772543d69]Ran a DOS-mode disk editor. I erased sectors 0-31 on the lead hard drive which erased the MBR and partition table.
[*:a772543d69]Booted to Windows, Windows saw both hard drives but assumed they were blank.
[*:a772543d69]Installed RAID Reconstructor. Ran it, told it that the two drives used in the RAID were connected, and told it that it was a RAID-0.
[*:a772543d69]RAID Reconstructor correctly identified the stripe size (64K), and correctly figured out which drive was "first" in the RAID, apparently without using any reference to partition table information, since I had erased that.
[*:a772543d69]RAID Reconstructor proceeded to build an .img file of the RAID on a 3rd hard drive I had. I stopped the build process after it had recovered about 30GB of the RAID (since my partition was known to be only 20GB).
[*:a772543d69]I quit RAID Reconstructor and started GetDataBack for NTFS. I used the .img file as imput. It scanned it and correctly identified the missing NTFS partition.
[*:a772543d69]I proceeded to have GetDataBack for NTFS recover all files. All 534 folders & 5504 files were successfully recovered, all folder structure was preserved, all files were intact.

I'm not plugging Runtime's products here, just relating to you what I found.

I had purchased the $179 bundle of their products a few weeks ago. (Bundle = GetDataBack for FAT, GetDataBack for NTFS, DiskExplorer for FAT, DiskExplorer for NTFS, and RAID Reconstructor). I used GetDataBack for NTFS at that time to recover a drive that had taken a power hit that destroyed track 0 (all sectors 0-63 unreadable). It did a full recovery in about 3 hours. I did the above test this weekend just to see how reliable and useful the RAID Reconstructor is.

In my opinion, this bundle is the best chance of recovering your data.