raid 0 data recovery?

I have two identical seagate 7200.9 500Gb drives confiured as a RAID 0 spanned disk in windows.

One of the drives has lost power and wont spin up at all.
I know this normally means death for the data on both drives but i have a cunning plan..

DISK 1 - NO POWER RAID 0 DISK
DISK 2 - FULLY FUNCTIONAL RAID 0 DISK
DISK 3 - FULLY FUNCTIONAL SPARE DISK

Copy the working drive (disk 2) data to a third 500GB DISK (disk 3), remove the logic board from the working disk (disk 2) and replace it with the non working logic board on the broken drive (disk 1) , then hopefully recreate the RAID 0 with disk 1 and disk 3, just long enough to get the data off it.

Hope this makes sense, here are my questions:

Windows disk manager atm recognises disk 2 but wont let me access it in anyway, therefore copying the data off it (or getting a disk image) cant be done in windows.

Does anyone know of any software (in linux or self booting) that would allow me to access this disk?
Anyone know of any software that will recreate the spanned drive off two disk images
Am i missing any key information that means i definitely shouldn't even bother starting this, i know its a long shot anyway but its worth a try unless i definitely cant do it.

The irritating thing is that i am sure its a logic board failure on disk 1 as it simply wont power up at all, suddenly no signs of life, so i am sure the data is intact!

Any help would be really appreciated!

Thanks

Fred

Posted 2009-12-15T06:50:52.553

Reputation:

2I doubt it will work. I sent off a drive (in the same condition) to the professionals and they're battling to restore the data - and that wasn't even part of a RAID 0 set. Your lesson here is to avoid striping unless you have a mirror. It's just not worth it without a backup. – None – 2009-12-15T07:46:55.760

Answers

While this plan is cunning, I doubt it will work. You will have hard time convincing RAID to access disk it didn't saw before. I have doubts that even another logic board will work.

You may be able to get broken hard drive to get spinning, but I doubt that (with different logic) board, it will get recognized at part of RAID.

Only chance that I see is copying data with dd to bigger (1 TB) disk, moving board to broken disk and repeating dd there. After that it is matter of RAID controller documentation on how exactly data was stored (usually it is just sequentially with 64K or bigger blocks). That should help you to order your block as they were. Once that is done, you should use dd again in order to write it back to disk.

Josip Medved

Posted 2009-12-15T06:50:52.553

Reputation: 8 582

Thanks for the answer, i have heard this "dd" mentioned a few times, can you give me more info please? What's its full name and where can i get it?

Thanks Again – None – 2009-12-15T10:38:24.840

Wikipedia says that dd stands for "dataset definition" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29). It is command line tool available in any Linux distribution. P.S. Until 1 minute ago, I had no idea what dd means. :)

– Josip Medved – 2009-12-15T11:59:18.247

Haha fair enough, ill admit that i actually wikipediaed (is that a verb) just after i said it too.

Not exactly an expert now but for lack of a better idea i think ill give you suggestion a go, thanks for the help and ill post the results up for anyone else to see. – None – 2009-12-15T12:37:53.243

I have recovered RAID 0 before (it was a using a Promise Fast Track raid controller that comes default on Asus p4c800e motherboards).

Some things you need to know

The moment any issue happens with a disk, in a RAID 0 (stripe), the array is dropped from the raid controller to prevent further loss.

If you get your disk to spin, you can go into your RAID controller BIOS interface. There you will probably see it as Array Offline, with: disk 0 normal disk 1 failed ...or something similar...

You will also have some options in that menu: DELETE the array. This will be scarry, but deleting the array from the controller does not delete the data (unless you chose the option with words like format, or initialize in it - so don't do that).

CREATE new array using the same exact controller, and using the same exact stripe size. Do NOT chose any option to initialize or format. Assuming that your drives are in same position (same disk0/same disk1) and that you told the Raid controller the SAME stripe size, you're array will be back to normal and should be bootable to Windows.

Do NOT GUESS the stripe size. If you're not sure, there are some free or trial Raid recovery tools for windows that can give you a preview of different stripe sizes look like, without writing anything to any disk. You would need to do this before you CREATE the array. In order to run these tools, you might have to hook your 2 drives to normal SATA ports, because since there would be no valid Array, it would be inaccessible in Window. If you do disconnect the drives, do yourself a big favor and PHYSICALLY mark the position of each drive so that when you hook them up back to the RAID controller, you will maintain the same order (drive 0 / drive 1)

At last, you may be able to recover files that are LESS than stripe size, from only one drive. For example if your stripe size was 128KB, there will be plenty of text files, documents etc... that you will be able to recover from one drive, using one of the free RAID recovery tools.

Hope this will help somebody who will be looking for this issue... i realize the date of the op post is many years ago :)

vmanta

Posted 2009-12-15T06:50:52.553

Reputation: 11

Why juggle data? Why not just move the logic board from the spare drive and put it on the dead drive and see if you can get it to spin up?

MDMarra

Posted 2009-12-15T06:50:52.553

Reputation: 19 580

Swapping logic board is a hit and miss because the SMART settings are specific to the drive and you will most likely read bad sectors, or erroneously flag good sectors as bad and make the data unretrievable – Nelson – 2015-02-12T07:07:02.150