Need Help w/ Raid 0 problem

S

superkdogg

Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2004
Messages
743
Hey. I do some tech work on the side, but I'm not formally educated. I know regular stuff, but this problem is beyond my knowledge and I'm hoping to get some help from you all.

Here's the scenario. Guy brings me computer. It won't boot to WinXP. He has a laundry list of other stuff, but that's the main thing. I plug it in and turn it on, and I find out that it has a 2x80 GB disk Raid 0 array. The array happens to be on the SIL 680 raid card, which I know from experience is a terrible card.

Both disks and the card appear to be working normally. The problem as I see it is that the card doesn't recognize the two disks are supposed to be a Raid0 set. The configuration utility says that Set 1 is disk 0 PM (primary master) and Set 2 is disk 3 SS (secondary slave).

So, is there any way to get the array fixed from this state? Is it as simple as telling the card to build another Raid 0 array with the same stripe size? Is there something else I need to do?

Please help me out. Thanks.
 
If it was Raid 1, wouldn't both drives be bootable on their own?

I presumed 0 since I took the two drives and the card and put them into another machine (for testing) and each drive was "unallocated" in the storage manager. I've only seen that for brand new drives, failed striped arrays, and drives with corrupted partitions in the past.
 
Hey hey guys. I thought that I'd update this because I actually found a combination of tools that worked!

http://www.runtime.org/

Their raid reconstructor program allowed me to create an image of the raid array bit by bit and put that on a drive in one of my computers for editing, so as you guys wisely said-I couldn't screw up the drives any worse than they started out.

Then I used the getdataback program from runtime to recover the data from the image. I don't know what he had on there when the array broke, but I was able to recover about 25 gigs of stuff, which could very well be all that was on it.

I highly recommend these tools. They were (too) easy to use (weird options that are poorly defined, but the defaults worked). The raid reconstructor is free for 30 days and the getdataback gives read access but you need to pay the 70 US to get the copying function.

My only issue with the programs is that they end up removing all heirarchy of the directories. Thus, this guy had 5000 or so directories and all were started at the root (if that makes any sense). Translation is that there is no way in hell his data can simply be copied back to the orignal drives, but at least it's still there. Unfortunately, I will not have it in my heart to charge him the $2k that the 'pros' would charge.

*While this post reads like an advertisement, I assure you it's not. Just that these tools should be publicized more because not all raid 0 arrays are dead when you think they are and I was lucky enough to prove that.

-------------------------

Dude, Tuscan-you rule!

The guy is happy to get his stuff back (he's done some missionary work in Isreal and pictures and stuff were on there) and he's offered to give me the old computer in addition to paying his bill. Thanks for the recommendation!

'kdogg
 
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