recovering data from RAID 0

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

k1v1116

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 13, 2008
Messages
968
Reaction score
8
recovering data from RAID 0 is a major pain in the ass!
A friend of my dad who does video editing for the local tv station had an external drive for all his data mostly video/audio stuff. its a 500gb lacie 1394b drive.
To make things a little faster this drive is not one 500gb drive but rather two 250gb in a RAID 0 array. of course he didnt back up his data and murphy's law struck, fortunately is was just the electronics of the harddrive enclosure that failed and the drives are fine but I cant just plug the drives into my PC and copy the files since its RAID0.
On top of all that within the RAID0 its a HFS+ partition and I use a windows PC so im using software that allows me to simulate a RAID0 environment with the two drives hooked to my system and then read HFS+ volumes.
But its kind of trial and error in getting the right settings for the RAID setup since I dont know what it was before.
If anyone has more experience with RAID Id welcome any advice that makes my life easier.
 
Well, technically you can't recover data from a RAID 0 failure. If it was a true RAID 0 (stripe set with no parity) a backup is the only option for recovery. Maybe the FBI can get his stuff back. Call 'em up and tell them you think the guy was a terrorist or something.
 
Maybe the FBI can get his stuff back. Call 'em up and tell them you think the guy was a terrorist or something.
I like that idea my tax dollars would actually go towards something useful for once.

this is the software im using http://www.r-studio.com/ it works fairly well ive already gotten most of the files.
 
...this is the software im using Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows it works fairly well ive already gotten most of the files.

It's possible too that the enclosure wasn't using a "true" RAID 0. In a true RAID 0 each file would be striped across multiple disks, so the failure of one (or a "breaking" of the array by removing a disk) would render that data unreadable because you'd have only partial files. I'm guessing that lots of these enclosure are using a drive-pooling scheme, but that the data itself may not be "striped" as is a traditional RAID 0.

In any event, I'm glad you're getting the data back. That's always a good feeling. :) Maybe the dude will take the trouble to back stuff up from now on. But probably not.
 
oh ok, I think I forgot to include in the first post that I have both disks of the array hooked up to my PC, the software simply needs to emulate the raid controller with the right settings. when I first saw the two disks I had my fingers crossed that it was RAID1 but no such luck. I suppose im fortunate that both the disks are intact and it was only the IDE to USB hardware in the drive enclosure that fried.

I have a RAID controller in my PC but from everything ive read trying to plug the disks into it and recreating a RAID group will delete the data on the disks, and I cant seem to find anywhere to buy just the enclosure for the drives to replace what fried.
 
oh ok, I think I forgot to include in the first post that I have both disks of the array hooked up to my PC, the software simply needs to emulate the raid controller with the right settings.

Pretty sweet looking software. So it recovered your stuff (or rather emulated the array)? Which version did you buy? Looking at their website, it's sort of confusing.

I do some tech support on the side for a few small businesses, and software like that might be handy to have.
 
well im still working out a few issues but I have been able to recover most of the files this guy needed, I think most of the issues im having are because I dont know the right settings for the array. if your looking for raid recovery software you can also look at runtime.org (raid recovery and get data back) they only work for FAT/NTFS so it wouldnt work for me in this case since Im working with HFS
 
Back
Top