Raid 0 Problem

cruiserman

i have been running winxp with a siig 2 channel raid 0 pci card with 2 maxtor sata 160 gig drives for a while until recently without problems. i was syncing my pda and xp blue screened and rebooted before i could see what the error was. when it restarted, it came up in the safe mode start menu. i chose all options and none will allow me to boot sucessfully. in safe mode i see the drivers loading and it always stops at mup.sys. after 30 seconds, it reboots by itself. it does this no matter which selection i choose.

i've tried several time starting the pc with the xp install cd and going into recovery console, but the process stalls when it gets to the "examining startup environment" phase. the same thing happens if i choose to install windows.

i disconnected the sata drive cables and installed an eide drive off of the mother board controller and loaded windows. the pc works fine. i then loaded the siig drivers and the controller is seen and appears to work accordng to windows device manager. i then disabled the controller, shutdown the pc and re-connected the sata drives. i boot into windows off of the eide and all is well. i then enabled the siig controller in device manager and it says the device is working properly. at this point, if i do anything to cause the o/s access the drive (i think even the eide), like starting application or explorer window, all drive access stops. windows still runs, but i cannot access any drives, including the eide. i have to hard boot the system.

last thing i tried was to put the controller and drives in another pc, but for some reason when it booted up, i would just get a blank screen.

any thoughts? i would be happy to just be able to mount the volume and get to some data that i didn't have a backup of. then i could kill the raid set and start fresh. it's just weird that i can boot off of the array, but it gets stuck at mup.sys.

thanks

Tex

run maxtors drive testing utilities on the drives. Thats where I would start anyway but it sounds like your hosed. Your problem is most recovery software won't even run on a raid-0 setup.

Tex

cruiserman

thanks for the response. btw: as luck would have it, my backup drive crashed a week before this happened. nice huh!?!?

anyway, i did find several data recovery apps that support raid. has anyone tried the following raid recovery software; RAID Reconstructor or Active@ UNDELETE? if so, any tips?

well, i'll be attempting this soon. keeping my fingers crossed.

thanks.

Tex

But you can't recover anything if the PC locks when you acess the array. It will happen when the recovery software tries to access it. Thats why I suggested trying to verify the drive was sound with maxtors utilities as it sounds like one is croaking. So you may be lucky to recover anything.

I recovered some vital stuff for a buddy recently when he sent me his drive but it literaly took 6 days to finish the initial scan which normally would take an hour or so. It would hang for an hour or so and then start again. He was lucky I had a spare box I could just let run for a week as most people would of shut it down. make sure the drive is sound before proceding. We knew his was failing but if thats the case you have a limited number of times to get it to powerup and maybe be recognized so messing around untill your ready to recover just cuts the odds. Again... I hope thats not the case but I would verify the drives with maxtors tools. They have non destructive tests that do not over write the disk. Don't do anything to write to the disk.

Tex

cruiserman

great points tex. i will try the maxtor utils first. i've also gotten another siig controller/cables to test with, if that is where the problem is.

i found another data recovery app, file scavenger...i'm not sure about the others, but with raid reconstructor, you boot the pc using a standard ide drive into winxp and with one raid drive at a time connected to the sata contoller (in non raid mode) and it will read the drive and create an image of it to the ide (or some other target). you then do the same for the 2nd drive. the app will then create a 3rd and final image by merging the 1st 2 images. for raid 0, it needs to know what the drive order and block size is set before hand. for raid 5 (not applicable to me), it also need the direction of rotation. it looks interesting.

thanks.

Tex

So you need twice the total disk space of the original raid array correct? And thats not counting the original array remember? You need up to 160gb to image each original drive so thats 320gb plus another 320gb to reconstruct the raid array into its completed state? Or did you just have a small amount of actual data and the recvovery tool only images the actual used space hopefully?

I have several TB's of space but I'm a weird-O on disk stuff.....man thats a lot to ask of most users? You got 640gb of space besides the original two disks sitting arround and you were not backing up? I'm gonna spank you ! (grin)

It needs block size or stripe size?