Recover Files from a Raid 0 Disaster
 

To my knowledge, outside of using expensive software or knowing someone with extensive knowledge of hard drives and raid configurations, its damn near impossible to recover files from a borked Raid 0 Array.

Recently, my main 24/7 Rig with everything loved by me on it, lost its Raid 0 Array. This system has been stable for a quite a long time without issues.

At the time of Death, I was listening to web-based Pandora.com music. First error was Pandora attempting to write to memory that it did not have permission to do so. I closed IE8 and restarted everything and continued listening to music. Then, splat, reboot.

Areca Raid Controller Post Screen related that the Raid 0 Array was in "out of normal" state. Further investigation showed one of the raptor drives was on the fritz (gone). :ohcrap:

I haggled with the system to try and coax the raptor back from the afterlife and attained a partial boot into Vista64. THe OS decided to do a checkdisk and attempt to repair, this failed. Tried this a few more times over a few days (Takes forever) and all of them failed.

I tried installing another iteration of Vista onto the borked array, this failed. Tried installing Win7, this failed. My intention was to get a working os and transfer all my precious files over and back it up. (I never backed this pc up because I had the false pre-tense that it was solid as a rock, AND I procrostinate :) )

SOLUTION:
During the repair screen, using the Vista Install disk, select load drivers. This brings up whatever the bios sees on the mobo. (Which is ridiculous that an install disk can see all the drives and files on them, including the raid array, but can't install to them WTF! )

Now select your user profile, in my case its a folder with my name (this includes desktop items, pics, music, downloads, bla bla bla bla). Right click, copy. Now navigate over to a usb external drive (Hook this up prior to boot). Select a location and paste. Boom, it'll start transfering all the files that are NOT corrupt.

COMMENTS: There were a bunch of files lost but I'd say 90% of my precious files were recovered.

Now to skip Raid 0 action for a while and run Raid 5 or make sure I damn well back up the entire array. Other options is to create a pass thru drive on the areca card and slap a 1terabyte drive on it and use that for continuous backups or precious data files. Mussint forget upgrading Areca 1220 firmware ;)

Hope this helps someone else with a bruised and battered Raid Array. :D

Specs:
6 150gb Raptor Raid 0 Array
790i Ultra SLI Mobo
OS Vista Ultimate

damn dude thats a tasty bit of info, and very useful, how did you figure this out?

Trial and Error until I realized that the install c.d. was reading all the damn files like it was x-mas. And it had loaded all the right click option like cut, copy, paste, rename etc. SO I figured wth, give it a try ;)

sticky this... and backup this post lol

Nice you were able to get some of your stuff back.

When mine went down the last time and I didn't know what was going on it started a checkdisk that was like you said, reading files like it was christmas, it went on for a very long time and in the end the Raid was dead.

The files that were saved on another disk were mostly there in the recovered super invisable file loctaion that only MS knows now to get there. I can't remember what it was called but I can find it of anyone needs.

I was able to copy the MyDocuments folder like you said and get that stuff back, most of it came back fine but I did lose some things.

I tried in vain to find a recovery boot DVD that I could boot and then be able to see this super invisable file loaction and get the rest of the junk off but after awhile I gave up.


As far as I know when Raid 0 setup go down you lose everything, period, you were lucky to be able to get stuff off. Raid 5 is def the way to go and run Accronis and remember to keep a Accross recovery disk up to date :)

+1, you got SUPER lucky, buddy. It may have something to do with a 6 disk raid config.... Your RAID 0 overkill may have saved that ass!

Truth be told, all of your files were corrupt, but since they were all broken up into 6 parts, you were able to recover most of them by Vista's nature. Basically the files with the more important blocks in tact were brought back to life in the same way defragging can put files back together. You can thank drive indexing and other little background features for that.

Looks like I'm going to fill my ports completely from now on for raid 0...... 10 disk array FTW!

Wow, very lucky Kal.

Nice bit of info! Raid 5 is definitely the way to go if you have enough disks for it

i will try some how get a copie of GeekSquad MRI and i think by using the F-Mod you can get your file off it
I THINK

Very lucky indeed!

I use raid0 Torqx ssd for os and everything I wanna keep goes on 3x Velociraptors in raid5