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geek alert - striped drive data recovery

Rusted

Rusted

Let's Ride!
Supporting Member
Location
Sandy
I need to recover approx 70 gigs of a stripped drive set. The windows install is bad and/or having virus issues. I don't have the computer in my hands yet, so I am not sure on specs, but I think it is a 2 year old asus motherboard using the asus hardware for raid 0. It fails over and over on the boot.

The data is important so I don't want to take any un-needed risks.

Has anyone had experience with one of the live cd's such as Knoppix or Ubuntu to view a stripped drive and copy it over a network or external USB? Even an internal drive I guess would work.

Any hints?
 
7

78mitsu

Registered User
The problem with raid 0 is it isn't raid at all, and files are striped across drives with no parity, meaning that if you lose one drive on the set, you're screwed.

--> generally if you have a raid failure, the OS won't even try to boot. You probabbly have a complete stripe, with bad sectors in an important space. I'd recommend adding an additional hdd to the system, then install a fresh copy of xp (unless of course you have a hardware independant image to load) then attach the stripe to the os as disk x and run

xcopy x:\*.* c:\copyofjunk\ /c /e /v /d /h <enter> from a command line. and it will copy anything recoverable as it recurses the directory tree.
 
Last edited:
mbryson

mbryson

.......a few dollars more
Supporting Member
Location
Bountiful, land of rocks
Wow! Whatever you do is kinda frought with risk. I wonder if you could do a boot load off of a Linux install (like your Ubuntu or Knoppix that you mention) and recover from the Linux kernel? (I'm not really a Linux guy, but have seen it do stuff like that.) However, if you can't read the disk, you can't read the disk as far as I know.


Backups man, backups.
 
7

78mitsu

Registered User
mbryson said:
Wow! Whatever you do is kinda frought with risk. I wonder if you could do a boot load off of a Linux install (like your Ubuntu or Knoppix that you mention) and recover from the Linux kernel? (I'm not really a Linux guy, but have seen it do stuff like that.) However, if you can't read the disk, you can't read the disk as far as I know.


Backups man, backups.
Click to expand...

Linux and Raid can get a little interesting because the way cheaper Raid cards present the disks to the OS, without the exact driver set, the Linux box sees all the member disks not as a stripe/mirror ), but as a individual disk, I'd stay away from a linux kernel until you've figured out the windows stuff.

Backups man, backups x11E10
 
troutbum

troutbum

cubi-kill
Location
SLC
Had the exact same thing happen on 2 raptors in Raid 0. I installed XP on a clean HDD and tried to recover the Raid array data that way, no joy. The array appeared corrupt. In the end I lost all of the data. The data was not valuable enough to me to spend more than a couple of days messing with, (mostly Mp3's and my wife's work portfolio :ugh: )

I am not a linux expert, but would you have the needed drivers?? I no longer run RAID 0, not enough of an upside for the hassle.
 
projektdotnet

projektdotnet

Cruiserhead
Location
Layton
mbryson said:
Wow! Whatever you do is kinda frought with risk. I wonder if you could do a boot load off of a Linux install (like your Ubuntu or Knoppix that you mention) and recover from the Linux kernel? (I'm not really a Linux guy, but have seen it do stuff like that.) However, if you can't read the disk, you can't read the disk as far as I know.
Click to expand...

In this case a Linux LiveCD (ubuntu installer, knoppix, etc) will be of no use to him. From Wikipedia
RAID 0: Striped Set (2 disk minimum) without parity: provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance from disk errors or disk failure. Any disk failure destroys the array, which becomes more likely with more disks in the array.

If you don't have a backup I hate to say it but you're hosed
 
7

78mitsu

Registered User
projektdotnet said:
In this case a Linux LiveCD (ubuntu installer, knoppix, etc) will be of no use to him. From Wikipedia
RAID 0: Striped Set (2 disk minimum) without parity: provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance from disk errors or disk failure. Any disk failure destroys the array, which becomes more likely with more disks in the array.

If you don't have a backup I hate to say it but you're hosed
Click to expand...


That depends whether the array is actually broken, or just damaged, if it isn't split, then it's simply a matter of mounting the file system and recovering the files from the array that are savable, if it isn't then you have to re-create the stripe db from the data that's on the disks, which is possible most of the time, but in terms of time can take literally weeks, and isn't guaranteed. My concert about a Linux file system is depending on the drivers it may not understand it's a stripe, and may treat the drives like individual physical drives instead of members of a stripe, which further complicates his problem instead of assisting in solving it. Now if we were talking about say a perc or cerc controller Id be all fore it, the drivers are in the base. I still sit with my original recommendation.
 
Rusted

Rusted

Let's Ride!
Supporting Member
Location
Sandy
I still have not seen the PC myself, but for some reason he is still blaming this on a virus / corrupt boot file. I guess it starts to boot to windows then gives the blue screen. So I am hoping that the data is still there.

Why didn't I think about the install new HD, putting windows on that drive then viewing the striped set. That will be my plan A. Good info on the linux driver issues. Thanks for saving me the work
 
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