PDA

View Full Version : RAID 0 Primary drive failure


NemesisChiken
01-06-2007, 06:20 PM
WOW, I never thought I'd have to start one of these threads ;)

OK, I screwed up bad. What I thought was a fan going bad on my ATI graphics card was actually a bearing or head on the first drive in a 2-drive RAID 0 (both drives look like 1 logical drive) configuration and it finally died last night. Both drives are WD 120G ATA/100 disks. When I bought the puter, it was preconfigured with RAID 0 and I should have just removed the RAID setup as I like to partition my drives for games / multimedia / etc, but didn't cuz I'm just to damn lazy and didn't (still don't) know that much about setting up RAID or breaking it down.

The second drive appears to be just fine. I'm pretty good about backing up stuff, but in the last few months I have done some SERIOUS work on NemBUS (http://www.nemesischiken.org/nembus/CoH.html) for CoH and don't have it backed up at ALL for my CoH programs - FAWK ME !!!!

I am actually considering some data recovery services if the price isn't too bad. I have 100's of hours of work in the CoH code for NemBUS and I would pay not to have to go thru all that pain again.

Anyways, anyone got some practical experience with RAID 0 that they could share with me. I have been surfin the 'net getting myself educated, but then again its the 'net and you can't believe everything you read. What I'm trying to figure out is:

Is there anyway to mount that second drive or salvage whats on that second drive myself?

There appears to be some limitation at the 137G mark for some MB's and BIOS's. I was thinking about just dropping a 250G or 320G single drive in the box which actually give me a little more space, less power consumtion, reduced internal heat, and a spare 120G drive from the RAID setup that I could plop into my MediaCenter PC which is always starved for disk space. I loose the second spindle on my gaming system which would suck and I don't think I wanna spend the $$$ for 10k RPM drive to make up for it. Any thoughts on that ... think I'll take much of a performance hit with just the one drive?

Drunken_Poonslayer
01-06-2007, 06:41 PM
Man that just sucks all the way around. I have never had a WD go bad, so I am definately of no help.

MoocherChiken
01-06-2007, 08:17 PM
Try some of the tools here:
http://www.ubcd2win.com
Look under the disk recovery tools.

GuerillaChiken
01-06-2007, 09:14 PM
I know a little bit about Raid Nemmy, but hopefully I am wrong, b/c I think you might have to contact a recovery company.

Raid 0 has no fault tolerance or redundancy, and has to be constantly backed up. It is striped so it divides up the data between hard disks, and there is no parity, so no way for one drive to know what the other drive has on there.

LIke I said, I am new at this stuff so hopefully I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that with RAID 0, if one drive fails, its like the whole drive failed, and the lsot data cannot be recovered by simply rebuilding the RAID set.

Yin Yang Chiken
01-07-2007, 01:13 AM
Yes, Rilla is right....from what I know about raid 0, both drives act as one, so the data is placed randomly on both drives. Sucks big time Nem!

SlackahChiken
01-07-2007, 06:16 PM
Raid 0 is a "striped" array configured for performance (speed) and not fault tolerance. From what I've seen, data revovery is anywhere between 1 and 3 dollars a gig (rule of thumb), but that usually is for disks in contact (physically). Prolly your best bet if the physical disks don't spin is the DR route.

Sorry Nemmy