RAID 0

[gduroc]

I really messed up this time. I am new to RAID and made a huge mistake in the process of trying to figure it out.

I had a WD 1TB Caviar Black with my OS already installed on it (I now know RAID needs to be setup before you install the OS). It had about 700GB of data and I wanted to setup RAID to back things up. I purchased a second WD 1TB Caviar Black for this setup. I then tried to setup RAID through the BIOS and was worried that setting it up through the BIOS would erase everything so I never initialized it. When I booted into Windows the RAID Software from the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard instantly recognized the desire to set it up and asked to initialize the process I initialized the process through the software thinking this was something that was easily disabled. I tried to turn it off and ended up rebooting. Back into the OS it continued to try to copy the drive to the other. At this point it was about 6% into the whole process.

I then booted back into the RAID BIOS and "Removed" the RAID setup. It prompted that the Raid would be erased but never really said that the Hard Drive would be erased as well as the OS. As I mentioned already I now understand as I was told by someone at MicroCenter that RAID needs to be setup before you install the OS. I was horrified to find the bootup screen asking me to use an install disk.

As it is now The original 1TB drive with the OS has not been formatted and is recognizable by disk management as a non formatted empty drive. The other 1TB Drive I formatted and have already put a few files on it.

Somewhat good news is that I Have used getdataback to recover most of the data. I would say %90 percent. It takes a good 5 hours or so to scan and pull up the original file structure. I consider myself lucky for this.



I attempted to use another program Active@ UNDELETE and it is now telling me that the drives combined are 2TB.


This leads me to believe that I may be able to use RAID Recovery and see if I can get the hard drive back to what it was. Is this possible?


I am a bit confused and am basically just wondering if this is worth trying to recover. Or, if anyone could recommend anything else.

Geraud

 

[Ubrales]

Start by recovering all your data. After that you may try experimenting with whatever you like. Read a lot about RAID before you make changes.

Personally, I prefer RAID1 to RAID0 because in RAID1 there is redundancy. This is better explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[4745454b]

NEITHER RAID0 or RAID1 IS A BACKUP! Its protection against a drive dying, it will do nothing if a virus wipes your drive, or you accidentally delete your term paper at 4am instead of saving it, etc. RAID0 should be used on a server that has 1,000 people trying to access data off of it, or RAID1 if your websever going down will cost you $$$ for each second that its offline. If you want a backup, use a correct backup choice. (such as putting that second 1TB drive in a USB box so you can plug it in when you want to backup whatever data you need to.)

I vote that if you've already got 90% of your data back, call it good. It sounds like it never setup the array, so the odds of using RAID recovery tools isn't good. You can try it and see, but I'd move on at this point. Unless you are missing your favorite files and REALLY want it back.

 

[gduroc]

Best answer selected by gduroc.

 

[gduroc]

Thanks 4745454b. This is what I needed to hear.

I consider this a lesson learned.