Cause of failure of Mirror RAID system

DerivedDaveDerivedDave
edited February 2009 in Hardware
My main PC (getting a little long in the tooth) is built round an Asus A7N8X-E motherboard with AMD Athlon XP2800 CPU and an onboard SiL 3112 RAID controller with matching Western Digital WD5000ABYS 500gb drives. 2 Days ago I woke up to find both drives empty i.e. the partitions removed and all systems and data lost on both. :(. I suspected the RAID Controller but really do not know. I reverted to no RAID system to preserve the mirrored disk. Restored an Acronis TrueImage 11 backed up complete image (unfortunately 2 months old). Also I do keep all important data backed up day by day to offline storage, so I have not lost too much - basically just 2 months of emails. So much for a RAID backup system. Has anyone got any ideas? I tried using Paragon Expert Partition Manager which found the missing partitions on the mirror drive but did not recover any data. Each partition is shown as empty in need of formatting. I can manage, but do not want to restart the RAID system until I know what happened. Both drives are working fine. This is my very first Forum post so please excuse if I have not followed the correct procedures.

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2008
    Unfortunately the only real way to see if it's your raid controller is to rebuild the array and see if anything goes wrong. Though it's odd that you lost the data if it was a simple raid failure. You should in theory be able to take a Raid 1 drive set hook them up as individual drives and read the data off of them. Now on the flip side if there is a problem with say windows and it goes south and deletes a bunch of files, it'll do that on both drives.
  • DerivedDaveDerivedDave
    edited December 2008
    kryyst wrote:
    Unfortunately the only real way to see if it's your raid controller is to rebuild the array and see if anything goes wrong. Though it's odd that you lost the data if it was a simple raid failure. You should in theory be able to take a Raid 1 drive set hook them up as individual drives and read the data off of them. Now on the flip side if there is a problem with say windows and it goes south and deletes a bunch of files, it'll do that on both drives.

    Thank you for this advice. Having now read the long thread on RAID system that you started some time ago, I have decided that it would be best to stop using the onboard RAID controller. I did think that I knew what I was doing with a RAID 1 system as a first line of protection but it is true that I will achieve almost the same result with much greater safety by making regular incremental backups to the second drive using TrueImage 11. It is still a mystery what actually happened to my system. Thanks again
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2008
    Without flogging a dead horse Raid - any raid isn't about data backup it's really only about I/O requirements and availability. It's unfortunate that so many people learn it the hard way and that RAID is frequently passed off as data protection.
  • foolkillerfoolkiller Ontario
    edited February 2009
    Note: I am aware this is an older post, this is just a FYI:

    I have seen this problem before on Maxtor drives, and there are a few solutions to it. First off you should image the drive with a forensic tool like Norton Ghost (You have to read the instructions to do a forensic copy.) The reason you do this is so that you are going to work on the forensic image of the disk, not the original disk, so if you screw up, you don't lose everything you want to keep.

    I ran into this issue and there were a couple ways to fix it. The easy one is to run fdisk /mbr off a dos boot disk or fixmbr off a Windows xp disk.

    The other option is to download Fix-CIH from grc.com. Yes, I know, the guy isn't all there, but that utility is quite nice. It will scan the disk and rebuild the MBR and Partition tables from the data structure, in all the cases of Maxtor failures, I recovered all the data off the drive intact.

    WARNING: Both of those options write data to the drive, so make sure it's not the original drive you are using this one. If these don't work, you are going to have to use data recovery software, of which there are many out there. There are also massively different qualities, and some programs will recover partial data, while another program will also recover some more data.
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