RAID Help

docsavagedocsavage
edited July 2004 in Hardware
:banghead:

My motherboard has croaked... I think... no power, no nothing.... replaced PSU... nothing... pulled all boards, etc... nothing....

Gigabyte GA-8IHXP - its been flawless for 24 months... but alas...it is tits up...

at any rate..it has an onboard promise raid. i have it set up with 2 80 GB maxtor drives in RAID 0. now that the MB is dead...what happens if i plug this setup into a new MB...RAID gone, data gone, ?.... or should I replace old motherboard with the exact same one.... if I can find one....

here is another laugh.... it is a rambus board....if i go to a new one....do i switch to ddr or just get an ASUS rambus board...

thanks for any input...

doc :smokin:

Comments

  • SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
    edited July 2004
    docsavage wrote:
    :banghead:

    My motherboard has croaked... I think... no power, no nothing.... replaced PSU... nothing... pulled all boards, etc... nothing....

    Gigabyte GA-8IHXP - its been flawless for 24 months... but alas...it is tits up...

    at any rate..it has an onboard promise raid. i have it set up with 2 80 GB maxtor drives in RAID 0. now that the MB is dead...what happens if i plug this setup into a new MB...RAID gone, data gone, ?.... or should I replace old motherboard with the exact same one.... if I can find one....

    here is another laugh.... it is a rambus board....if i go to a new one....do i switch to ddr or just get an ASUS rambus board...

    thanks for any input...

    doc :smokin:
    The data won't be gone, but the you'll have to re-create the array, or rather re-build it. If it is an identical controller/board then you may get lucky with being able to re-structure the array, but you'll just have to try it.

    In any event the data will still be present on you hard drives, it will just be scattered accross the two, so you should be able to retrieve some of it by plugging each individual disk into another system. But don't quote me on that, I'm not 100% sure.

    Nevertheless, sorry to hear you're having trouble with your board. I might take this oppotunity to remind people to always keep an uptodate backup just in case of problems like this.

    Let us know how you get on.

    Spinner
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    docsavage wrote:
    :banghead:

    My motherboard has croaked... I think... no power, no nothing.... replaced PSU... nothing... pulled all boards, etc... nothing....

    Gigabyte GA-8IHXP - its been flawless for 24 months... but alas...it is tits up...

    at any rate..it has an onboard promise raid. i have it set up with 2 80 GB maxtor drives in RAID 0. now that the MB is dead...what happens if i plug this setup into a new MB...RAID gone, data gone, ?.... or should I replace old motherboard with the exact same one.... if I can find one....

    here is another laugh.... it is a rambus board....if i go to a new one....do i switch to ddr or just get an ASUS rambus board...

    thanks for any input...

    doc :smokin:

    As far as the raid goes if you get another PROMISE RAID controller based board it will probably work but getting one with the same chipset as yours (Promise used several chipsets) WILL JUST ABOUT GUARANTEE it works. Check ebay for another motherboard. Great source for older used motherboards cheap. If its a differant MB you may have to do a XP repair install to get it running but the raid data will be there.

    Also consider maybe getting a cheap promise fasttrack pci raid card you can try in any new MB if you go that way.

    And there is NO WAY to plug each raid-0 disk in and get any data back. In raid-1 you could possibly but not in raid-0. You get garbage plugging a raid-0 disk into a regular controller and may well damage the array thus ending any shot at getting data off.

    Tex
  • SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
    edited July 2004
    Tex wrote:
    And there is NO WAY to plug each raid-0 disk in and get any data back. In raid-1 you could possibly but not in raid-0. You get garbage plugging a raid-0 disk into a regular controller and may well damage the array thus ending any shot at getting data off.

    Tex
    Ok, thanks for setting me straight on that. I wasn't sure. :)
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    The files are split into tiny pieces and it alternates stuff from one drive to another. Without both drives there is no filesystem left or anything to read.

    Tex
  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited July 2004
    There are recovery tools that will work if both drives are connected without a RAID controller though, right? I'm sure I've seen one. You do have to be careful about modifying stuff though.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    Post a link. I've never seen one that can do anything without the raid controller. Every differant manufacturer does this differant thats why you can't take a promise raid array and have it work on SI or HPT or anything else. In fact most disk recovery tools will not work on raid arrays period.

    I am not saying your wrong I'm saying I would love to see a link as this would be a very hard thing to do without the raid card or raid hardware that created the array. It would have to be written specialy for every raid controller manufacturer and even differant makes from a single manufacturer even. So a module for recovering HPT and Promise SI 3ware, lsi, raidcore, etc and even those vary by model at times... I have a lot of highend disk tools and scsi tools and I have never seen anything like that. I have seen stuff that tries to repair a damaged array? But not recover data from an array when you do not even have the proper raid hardware.

    Tex
  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited July 2004
    Presumably the data starts near the beginning of the drive, and if you know stripe&cluster you can then read the file system's allocation tables. I thought in a piece of undelete software I was looking at, it had an option for getting data off two drives from a RAID array (but no longer on the controller) - I'll look for it. It may be that it was only for soft arrays created by Windows.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    Now thats much easier to buy into! Windows dynamic software raid doesnt need a raid controller. Because thats a format more readily "reverse engineered" that is not hidden thru the controllers/bios/firmware and drivers. Not many people jack with dynamic disks because MS still considers it proprietary from what I understood.

    The complexity is that the stripe and cluster is differant for every partition. Some can be raided and some not but if they were good its feasable they could figure out how to unlock the dynamic disks header data. Thats cool in and of itself as many disk utities don't work with dynamic disks that are not even raided !!!

    Still very cool software and niftier then what I have been using to recover data so if you remember what software it was please do post back. That would be another nice tool.
  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited July 2004
    Well, this is the one I think I was looking at before (although it's been a long while). Near the bottom it mentions broken RAID-0 and RAID-5 recovery. Never tested it myself, my RAID is still healthy thank you :)

    http://www.webmasterfree.com/software/SystemUtilities/DataRecoveryTools/file_scavenger_2.1i.html
  • alaskanAssassinalaskanAssassin
    edited July 2004
    I have a question about my RAID setup. I am setting up a RAID - 0 which I have actually had running for about 9 months now, but now I am trying to optimize. I have a soyo dragon 2 platinum with 2 - maxtor 120gb SATA. When setting up the RAID I have the option of choosing chunk size from 4kb up to 128kb. Is is best to choose the highest or lowest number. I noticed I got better ATTO scores from the 64 and 32kb than the 128kb, but I just wanted someone elses opionion.

    Thanks
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    16k for all round performance if you were using it for an OS and stuff or maybe up to 32k would be the max stripe on those drives usually.

    tex
  • alaskanAssassinalaskanAssassin
    edited July 2004
    Tex wrote:
    16k for all round performance if you were using it for an OS and stuff or maybe up to 32k would be the max stripe on those drives usually.

    tex

    Thanks for the help...could you possibly give me some more info. though? What is the difference between 4k to 128k and in my bios it says chunk size, not stripe size. Are these the same thing? Thanks again!
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    You want me to explain the terms? Like about how raid works and what the terms mean or what? What a 4k stripe versus a 16k stripe does? Glad to help I just want to make sure I don't start a long explanation and you go.... Well yeah I knew that....

    Let me know. Glad to help. And yes the stripe is what your bios is calling a chunk btw...

    In a nutshell the stripe is the amount written to each drive alternately. So 16k to one drive then the other. You also want to try and match the disk cluster size when you format. So your stripe and cluster is say 16k. The cluster is the smallest amount the os writes. So when you write each alternates each time back and forth to each drive.
    Otherwise you write clusters until you fill a stripe and then write it. With other drives or certain types of applications you may want a larger stripe but for general usage with ide drives a 16k/16k stripe/cluster is usually optimal or very close.

    Tex
  • alaskanAssassinalaskanAssassin
    edited July 2004
    Thanks...that helps out a lot. but where can I change the cluster size for the drives..

    Thanks again
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited July 2004
    Using an application that can resize clusters. An example is Partition Magic 8 :)

    For those with RAID-0 setups, backing up your data reguarly is utterly essential!

    Even if you only use the basic Windows Backup utility once a week, it's a damn sight better than losing everything.
Sign In or Register to comment.