recovering a lost RAID array

slaviaslavia
edited July 2006 in Hardware
I have a fastrak PCI RAID card (Fasttrak66) with two harddrive in Stripe 0 and formatted with two partitions. My windows XP suddenly crashed one day and upon restarting, the array became "OFF-LINE." I have unplugged the drives and restarted, producing no result. Upon advice of others, I entered the fasttrack utility, where I saw that one of the drives was in ARRAY 1 and the other one FREE. I deleted the array and chose the first option in the menue (AUTOSETUP, I think) to establish a new array. The array became functional, but the partitions are still unaccessible. Programs like PartitionMagic display the harddrive as unformatted. They don't see any partition. My question: is there anything I can do to get the partitions back?

Comments

  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    That's a major bummer. One of the downsides of RAID 0 is that there's no redundancy, so if one drive goes, you can potentially lose everything.

    You can give a program called RAID Reconstructor a try. It's $99, but I've used it at my office and it's worth the money. I don't know of any free alternatives, unfortunately. After that, you can use a data recovery program, like PC Inspector or TestDisk.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    I highly recommend, once you've salvaged whatever (if any) data that you can, that quite using RAID 0 completely, unless:

    1) you don't mind risking the data on the array
    2) you have a backup regimen that you run routinely, religiously

    I am speaking from my own experience as well as nearly everyone else in this forum who has extensive experience with RAID 0.

    You might consider running RAID 0+1, which provides data redundancy.
  • slaviaslavia
    edited July 2006
    thanks for the advice:D
    I know RAID 0 is not stable, but I have gotten it about 5 years ago, when the harddrives weren't big and mirroring was a money issue. I have been dilligently keeping backup but one or two files escaped my attention, what can I say.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    I apologize if I sounded uncaring. Trust me, I've been through what you're describing. The positive thing about RAID 0 for me was that, like you, it trained me to perform regular, complete system backups. I quit using RAID 0 in 2003. For me the slight benefits versus risk just did not make sense.

    You know, the newer hard drives, both SATA and PATA, are fast enough that you wouldn't even miss your RAID array.

    Again, I hope you are able to recover what you need to.
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    If your card supports it, RAID 10 is better than RAID 0+1. The problem with RAID 0+1 is that you're mirroring a striped array, so if one drive goes down, you're back to having a striped array. With RAID 10, you're striping the mirror, so if a drive goes down you still retain a RAID 1 array. Both are better choices than RAID 0 alone, as they both provide fault tolerance and the speed gains of striping. The downside to both, obviously, is the need for 4 drives instead of 2.
  • LammypieLammypie
    edited July 2006
    slavia wrote:
    is there anything I can do to get the partitions back?

    I had a similar problem a little while ago. Profdlp recommended Testdisk

    It worked a treat, and recovered the Raid for me. its easy enough to use, although it can be daunting if you are unfamiliar with the terms it uses.

    The most important thing is don't panic, don't write anything to your drives. boot testdisk from a floppy disk or CD (a boot floppy with the dos version of this is now a permanent member of my emergency pack)

    Need any help with it then ask.

    Oh yeah, and the old faithful, which I failed to do : KEEP A BACK UP - Particularly with Raid - 0

    Kind Regards
    Chris
  • slaviaslavia
    edited July 2006
    Lammypie wrote:
    I had a similar problem a little while ago. Profdlp recommended Testdisk

    It worked a treat, and recovered the Raid for me. its easy enough to use, although it can be daunting if you are unfamiliar with the terms it uses.

    The most important thing is don't panic, don't write anything to your drives. boot testdisk from a floppy disk or CD (a boot floppy with the dos version of this is now a permanent member of my emergency pack)

    Need any help with it then ask.

    Oh yeah, and the old faithful, which I failed to do : KEEP A BACK UP - Particularly with Raid - 0

    Kind Regards
    Chris

    I will give it a try. Just need to find a floppy somewhere, hehe
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited July 2006
    You can also get a CD version, either as a standalone program or as part of the UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) package.

    Free free free! :p
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