RAID issue

[cyberpotato]

I have two drives that were set up in a striped RAID configuration. A while back one of the drives seemed to have failed, as the BIOS was no longer able to see it. I tried putting them into another computer to verify it was the drive, and got the same result.

Today, just out of curiosity, I decided to try connecting them each through an external enclosure that connects through USB. I did this individually, since I have only one enclosure, just to see if Windows would see the drives. Windows 7 was able to see both drives, but not in the same way.

The Windows Disk Management tool identified one as being "unallocated" and the other as being "unallocated, raw". I think this means one is partitioned, but not formatted and the other is not partitioned. I don't know if this is normal for a striped RAID setup, but am imagining one drive may manage the other, which might explain this. Is this a good guess? If so, I was thinking about imaging them and using a software tool to try to rebuild the RAID drive as a virtual RAID drive, hopefully retrieving my data. If not, then I guess one of them (the "raw" one?) is irretrievable, and I can just repartition/reformat them and use them as extra drives.

Any help understanding this would be greatly appreciated, and I would also be grateful for any thoughts on the feasibility of imaging and rebuilding as a virtual RAID drive.

Thanks!

 

[tokencode]

If your striper set broke you will not be able to see the partitions on the drives and it will show unallocated space. You will need recovery utility and lots of spare storage space (twice the total amount of your old array). Download R-Studio (r-tt.com) and make images of te raw data from both drives, you can then you those images to recreate the stripe set inside r-studio and copy it to a new partition. You may need to try different stripe orders if youu don't know which drive was first in the strip.

 

[cyberpotato]

If your striper set broke you will not be able to see the partitions on the drives and it will show unallocated space. You will need recovery utility and lots of spare storage space (twice the total amount of your old array). Download R-Studio (r-tt.com) and make images of te raw data from both drives, you can then you those images to recreate the stripe set inside r-studio and copy it to a new partition. You may need to try different stripe orders if youu don't know which drive was first in the strip.

Thank you tokencode. That helps a lot.

 

[tokencode]

No problem, I have had a near-perfect recovering data using that method with up to 10 drives in RAID 10. The more drives in the drive the harder it can be to align the stripes correctly.

 

[cyberpotato]

No problem, I have had a near-perfect recovering data using that method with up to 10 drives in RAID 10. The more drives in the drive the harder it can be to align the stripes correctly.

10 drives definitely sounds complicated. I can only imagine.

I didn't consider I'd need so much space to rebuild it, so I'm quite glad you told me that.

I'm really puzzled that I can access the drive using USB, but not using SATA. If it only happened on one computer I'd think I had a MB issue, but since it happened on two, it's left me very confused. Oh, well, I love a good problem.

 

[yorkshire]

If your striper set broke you will not be able to see the partitions on the drives and it will show unallocated space. You will need recovery utility and lots of spare storage space (twice the total amount of your old array). Download R-Studio (r-tt.com) and make images of te raw data from both drives, you can then you those images to recreate the stripe set inside r-studio and copy it to a new partition. You may need to try different stripe orders if youu don't know which drive was first in the strip.[/quotemsg
Thats fine, Thanks for this nice post.