wacky.banana

Not having a good week this week. First the boot disk on my main PC dies and I have to put in a new one and rebuild, now my RAID array on my other PC has died.

Its been ages since I did this kind of stuff, hence the questions here. Do I have to have an exact/duplicate physical hard drive in order to rebuild the array or not? I think its a RAID zero array but as I said its been ages since I built it.

Is there a way of pulling data off the drives without rebuilding? FYI its the boot disk of the array that has failed. System says it has been removed, however I am not aware of any incident that may have caused this. Any other ways of recovering from this?

Some clear advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

WB

chump

If its a RAID 0 then there is no redundancy so you will have lost any data on the disks (unless you try a recovery tool or send it to a company that recovers it for you). That is one of the risks of using RAID0. RAID 1 or RAID 5 is designed for redundancy unlike RAID 0 which is a striped array designed for Performance......AFAIK

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

As the man says: if it's a RAID 0 array then you've lost everything.

However

It's possible that all you've done is bork the boot sector. When you say "the system", I take it you mean BIOS? If BIOS can't see one drive, first of all make sure both power and data cables are correctly plugged in. If BIOS still can't see the drive, then yes, you are in trouble. If BIOS ca see the drive, but not the RAID array, then it may be possible to rebuild the array, especially if you used default settings originally. But don't get your hopes up.

In general, yes, you need a second drive of identical spec: no of heads, sectors etc. If you can't get an identical drive then just get two new ones, then use the spare one for data backup.


M

wacky.banana

OK guys, thanks for the responses. FYI BIOS can see the drives but the array has crashed/is dead.

Seems I either buy another set of identical drives and try to rebuild or I cut my losses and rebuild from scratch accepting the lost data as a fact of life.

If I do the latter I guess I won't be mucking about with RAID arrays again. Yes, I was looking for increased performance (system mainly used for video editing) hence the RAID idea in the first place.

Bah humbug

jaytc2003

iTrader: (1)

If you are on xp then boot from the cd and run the recovery consol. could just be a matter of fixing the mbr, worth a try.
Or another option is why not get 2 new drives anyway use that for doing a fresh install of the operating system. Then once fully installed, connect up the failed drives and see if windows recognizes them. then retrieve all of the info if possible.

wacky.banana

Jay,

Thanks for that. Working on it.

Cheers

WB