Experience with RAID Recovery Tools

[thiggins]

Has anyone ever tried recovering RAID 0 or 5 volumes using a RAID recovery program or toolset? I'm not talking about drive recovery services. I'm interested in DIY experiences.

 

[Rancid]

Hi Tim.

I came across this site whilst looking into some speed issues with my FreeNas (but thats a different issue).
I have seen your question and would like to recount a recent issue when i needed to recover data from a raid 0 where the original controller had failed.

The original setup was a striped raid using 2x750GB Segate 7200.10 Sata drives in a single striped container. This was formatted into two partitions (100GB for OS and the rest DATA). This was all connected to an NVraid controller on board an Nforce 650i Mobo.

During a botched attempt to flash the Mobo bios via a windows based bios flasher (groan).....it all went pete tong and the mobo died along with my raid container.

Yes your all slapping your heads and giving it the basics ABC's of raids/bios updates and not drinking cool cans of beer whilst working on your PC's.
Whatever...... it seemed like a wise move at the time.

So wifey ( i tell her) the deal is the mobo's toast and i need to get a new mobo and maybe a CPU and some memory..cause its gotta be compatible you know.
Ok ok she says......buy what you have to as long as it gets my photos back...

Photos ?

Erm...What photos....

It seems during another cool beer drinking session my wife had complained that she had photos stored every where. On CD's on memory cards and in her camera. She complained she didn't know what was where or how to find it. being super tech that i am , i moved all the photos from all the different media into one foler on my massive 1.5tb raid and then use some sort of photo inventory/manager app to look after them.
i got as far as copying them all to my data partition.

im sure many of you will now be feeling my (incomming pain).

First i toyed with the idea of trying to rescue the bad bios flash.
The mobo had a 512k SST chip for which i have a programmer.
the chip is hard wired to the board and not in socket (boo cheap mobo)

then i considered trying to find the same mobo but it was a couple of years old by now.

then considered a new Nforce board with a newer NVraid controller, but i was unsure if the container would remain, plus i didn't want to chance a loss of data.

however all was not lost...
after much googling on the issue some one recommend a piece of software called raid2raid.

i installed the two 750GB drives into another PC on a vanilla Sata controller (no raid). Installed the raid2raid software.

The software picked up the fact the drives where part of a raid 0. it recognized it was an NVraid container.
Long story short i was able to copy all the data from the drives to an external usb drive.

i have only used the software the once, but i assume that as long as it can see the drive and what every type of partition is on it then it will attempt to rebuild the raid container.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the story. Got a link for the exact program that you used?

 

[BriComp]

I googled raid2raid and came up with http://raid2raid.com/
Looks interesting.
I have also found this site which has what it calls a RaidRecontrsuctor. http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

 

[Rancid]

I googled raid2raid and came up with http://raid2raid.com/
Looks interesting.

That is the software.
Its freeware with out registration.
i only used it the once but i recall it being very simple to install and use.
No configuration or tricky technical stuff to worry about.

 

[BriComp]

Hi,
I have an LSI MegaRaid card with Twin SAS 15k drives in Raid0 configuration.
I thought I would give Raid2Raid a try. After running, it just sat for what seemed like hours Scanning for Raid drives.
I had to use Trak Manager to quit out of it in the end.
It would seem to opnly work with drives attached to the motherboard.

 

[thiggins]

Looks like DiskInternals has numerous recovery products. Did you try the RaidRecovery trial?

 

[BriComp]

I don't have a problem at the moment...I used to be in the Scouts "Be Prepared"

 

[Rancid]

I don't have a problem at the moment...I used to be in the Scouts "Be Prepared"

Nothing wrong with being prepared.

I recall a business type bloke on the radio recently.
He said that LUCK is nothing more than when preparation meets opportunity.

 

[claykin]

The one time I had to recover a RAID 5 array that appeared corrupt I used Spinrite from GRC. Took all 4 disks out of the array and mounted each one one by one to a motherboard SATA port. Ran Spinrite on each drive in Level 4. After about 2 days of scanning each drive, and correcting a few errors, I reconnected the array and to my surprise it started OK.

I understand that Spinrite is not a direct RAID recovery, but from my experience many times the issue is the disk itself. Spinrite has proven to be a valuable tool.

 

[mahojazz]

One of my worries abt running RAID is the failure of the RAID card. Since RAID is suppose to prevent data lost due to HDD failure, but what if the RAID card itself failed. Does replacing the RAID card solves the problem? isnt raid suppose to be the standard, so any raid card should be able to read the raid drive? at least for the cards from the same manufaacturer?

 

[thiggins]

Depends on how/when the RAID card failed. If during write, then the array could be damaged or lost.

I would only be guessing about being able to substitute a RAID card. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can chime in?